TRAPPED
in the
MIRROR
ADULT
CHILDREN
OF NARCISSISTS
IN THEIR
STRUGGLE FOR
SELF
Elan Golomb, Ph.D.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
1: HOW TO RECOGNIZE A NARCISSIST AND NARCISSISM
2: WHO IS THE ADULT CHILD OF A NARCISSIST?
3: THEY MAKE YOU CONFORM TO THEIR WILL, EVEN IN
YOUR THINKING
4: ANNE AND THE INVISIBLE FORCE
5: SUICIDAL URGES: JOHN
6: ATTRACTION TO NARCISSISTIC MATES BY CHILDREN OF
NARCISSISTS: DELORES
7: NO RIGHT TO LIVE IF YOU CANNOT LOVE: HOW A
NARCISSIST PUT HIS INABILITY TO LOVE ONTO HIS
CHILD
8: THE DESTRUCTIVE INNER PARENT: VICTORIA
9: A LIFE DEVOID OF MOTIVATION: NICK
10: THE CHILD OF A NARCISSIST WHO BECOMES A
NARCISSIST: ALAN
11: ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOR IN CHILDREN OF NARCISSISTS:
MARIE, FAT IS DEAD—OBESITY AS A PROTECTIVE
DEVICE
12: RAISING A CHILD TO FULFILL THE NARCISSISTIC
PARENT’S HEROIC IMAGE: MARK, UNABLE TO RESPOND
TO HIS CHILD’S DEPENDENCY NEEDS, REQUIRES THE
CHILD TO BE HEROIC
13: CHANGING FROM WEAKNESS INTO STRENGTH: HOW TO
DEVELOP A REAL SENSE OF SELF
14: HOW TO FIND AND HEAL YOUR SELF
15: WHAT DO WE CALL LOVE? WHERE AND HOW DO WE
SEEK IT?
16: PEOPLE IN STAGES OF SELF-DEVELOPMENT
17: LEARNING TO RELATE TO THE NARCISSISTIC PARENT:
THE WAY IT IS AND HOW IT CAN BE IMPROVED
18: SENDING HOME THE NEGATIVE INTROJECT
EPILOGUE
INDEX
Acknowledgments
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Praise
INTRODUCTION
There is a group of unsung victims
whose number is very great. They often do not seek the help they
need because they do not recognize that they suer from a problem
for which there is a solution. These are the children of narcissistic
parents. I know their plight from the inside since I am one of them.
A friend asked me, “What are narcissists? Aren’t they people who
think themselves special?” The answer to this is yes and no. All
healthy people regard themselves as special, unique beings capable
of achievement and worthy of love, and it is no coincidence that this
is exactly the way their parents saw them during their formative
years. People who are relatively free of narcissistic traits (most of us
have some) do not attempt to place themselves above others. They
are unconcerned with such comparisons. They stay in touch with
their feelings and try to do their personal best. Their standards are
internal and realistic since they have a good idea of who they are
and what they can accomplish (such objectivity is not insignicant).
They are not free of idealistic wishes and dreams.
Narcissists are wholly dierent. They unconsciously deny an
unstated and intolerably poor self-image through ination. They
turn themselves into glittering gures of immense grandeur
surrounded by psychologically impenetrable walls. The goal of this
self-deception is to be impervious to greatly feared external criticism
and to their own roiling sea of doubts.
This gure of paradox needs to be regarded as perfect by all. To
achieve this, he or she constructs an elaborate persona (a social
mask which is presented to the world). The persona needs an
appreciative audience to applaud it. If enough people do so, the
narcissist is relieved that no one can see through his disguise. The
persona is a defensive schema to hide behind, like the false-front
stores on a Western movie set. When you peer behind the propped-
up wall, you nd … nothing. Similarly, behind the grandiose
parading, the narcissist feels empty and devoid of value.
Because his life is organized to deny negative feelings about
himself and to maintain an illusion of superiority, the narcissist’s
family is forcibly conscripted into supporting roles. They have no
other option if they wish to get along with him. His mate must be
admiring and submissive to keep the marriage going and his
children will automatically mold themselves into any image that is
projected upon them.
Here the tragedy begins. A narcissist cannot see his children as
they are but only as his unconscious needs dictate. He does not
question why his children are incredibly wonderful (better than
anyone else’s) or intolerably horrible (the worst in all respects) or
why his view of them ricochets from one extreme to another with
no middle ground. It is what they are.
When he is idealizing them, he sees their talents as mythic, an
ination that indicates they are being used as an extension of his
grandiose self. When he hates them and nds their characteristics
unacceptable, he is projecting hated parts of himself onto them.
Whether idealizing or denigrating, he is entirely unaware that what
he sees is a projection and that his views are laying a horrible
burden on his child.
It is uncanny to observe how early the process of projection
begins. Before the child is conceived, roles are already assigned in
the narcissist’s mind to the esh of his esh. The expected
characteristics are conrmed by subtle actions of the fetus in the
womb, and when the baby arrives the parent starts ratifying his
projections through his interactions with the child.
For example, a narcissistic father was able to stop experiencing
feelings of weakness as his own by nding them in the personality
of his four-week-old daughter. He never questioned the validity of
his perceptions. Such thoughts would occasionally reappear, only to
be pushed aside and defended against by focusing on others’ aws,
including those of his child. He buttressed his argument by judging
her physical movements feeble and low in energy as well. Clearly,
she was “biologically inferior.” The baby’s characterization stuck
and her fate was sealed.
The mother duplicated her mate’s view, unconsciously
suppressing doubts and contradictory perceptions. Her thinking was
inuenced by the fact that her husband could only accept her when
she agreed with him. She was in love with him at the time and very
much wanted to please. It is worth noting that a person who marries
a narcissist often does so to augment low self-esteem by
amalgamating his or her ego with that of one who radiates
greatness. They are excessively threatened by their mate’s potential
rejection and will readily give the required responses.
This child grew up according to parental blueprint. She became
an overly compliant person, often turning to her narcissistic father
to make her decisions. She took up her mother’s profession and her
mother’s submissive role as the appropriate way to express
femaleness and to relate to men. In doing so, she assumed the role
that her narcissistic father could accept in a woman.
One hallmark of the child of a narcissist is that these children
tend to take values wholesale from the parent rather than tailor
them to t their own personalities. Narcissists appreciate carbon-
copy children, since any change or dierence from their prototype is
experienced as a criticism.
The young woman became the “perfect” daughter, obediently
expressing her parents’ nouveau riche values. She played tennis,
took sailing lessons, spoke French, and summered in Europe. She
was not outstanding in any of her acquired skills, probably because
her participation lacked passion. Her whole self was not involved in
anything she did. She was upset that no great talent ever emerged
from her eorts. She was somewhat overweight although attractive,
but rarely dated. None of the young men she encountered could
measure up to her dad.
Still, she was remarkably agreeable, always smiling and nodding,
suspiciously free of malice. In fact, she was rather boring.
Inexplicably, this paragon of pleasantness came to be troubled by
mounting feelings of rage. She was confused. Why should she be
angry if all was so perfect in her world? She had never perceived
anything damaging in the pressures placed upon her to become a
polished showpiece. Such thoughts were taboo.
Her rage became uncontrollable. It took the form of world
destruction fears in which everything was going to be blown up in a
nuclear holocaust. This obsession reected a projection of her
repressed explosive feelings. Fortunately, these fears drove her into
therapy. Her parents found it upsetting to accept that she needed
help since this reected upon their adequacy as parents. Their
daughter had to be on the brink of insanity before she or anyone
else in the family could admit that something wasn’t right.
The ospring of narcissists grow up fullling their assigned roles.
They may sense that they are in a state of falsehood, but do not
know what to do about feelings of nonauthenticity. They try all the
harder to become what they are supposed to be, as if their feelings
of uneasiness come from an improper realization of their role. If
their parents see them as miserably decient, from the shape of
their bodies to the power of their minds, that is what they become.
If they were portrayed to themselves as great muckamucks,
especially if they have innate ability to fulll a powerful role, they
become the movers and shakers of society.
At heart, children of narcissists, raised up or cast down by the
ever-evaluating parent, feel themselves to be less than nothing
because they must “be” something to earn their parents’ love.
Conditional love oers no support for the inner self. It creates
people who have no personal sense of substance or worth.
Nourished on conditional love, children of narcissists become
conditional. They nd themselves unreal.
The stories in this book concern the struggles of children of
narcissists to free themselves from the web of their parents’
distortions. Here we see the psychological reefs on which our
lifeboats may be wrecked, not the least of which is our own
unhappy narcissism acquired through identication with the
powerful parent.
The people in these anecdotes often feel hopeless and paralyzed.
Sometimes they break through to a sense of their true selves. Then
they know freedom and joy. The journey is a rough one for all who
undertake it. It is also the only trip worth taking.
You who recognize your story on these pages can take hope from
the experience of the others, that it is possible to undo the illusions
under which we were raised. Let us all work to rid ourselves of
falsely imposed images in order to nd our true identities.
1
HOW TO RECOGNIZE A NARCISSIST AND NARCISSISM
It has been said that narcissism is a
common condition of modern society, that in the past there were
narcissists but never in such profusion. Louis XIV, when he uttered
his famous comment, “L’état, c’est moi” (I am the state) was
expressing the quintessential narcissistic viewpoint of
monomaniacal self-centeredness. The French Revolution was set o
by his feelings of narcissistic entitlement. Louis’s ego was so inated
that he felt it represented the needs of all France. If Louis ate,
France should feel satised. Marie Antoinette oered her own
narcissistic reaction to the starving masses begging for bread when
she uttered her insouciant cry, “Let them eat cake.” Since her belly
was lled, their request for mere subsistence seemed ridiculous.
These two comments are like bookends of similar design. They
imply, “My needs are all; nothing and no one else counts.”
A narcissist is interested only in what reects on her. All she does
or experiences is seen as a reection of self. The name of this
psychological aberration is derived from the ancient Greek myth of
Narcissus, a beautiful young man beloved of the nymphs. The
nymph Echo fell in love with Narcissus’s beauty but he paid no
attention to her increasingly mournful cries. To the gods looking
down upon the play of men, unrequited love was a crime. They
punished Narcissus in appropriate symbolic form by causing him to
fall in love with his own reection, ever reaching out to embrace an
illusion.
Each time Narcissus reached for his adored image mirrored in a
pool of still water, it would dissolve into numberless ripples. The
narcissist, who is constantly trying to repair her injured self-esteem
by adorning and admiring her gilded self, is also haunted by the
terror of psychological fragmentation should she become aware that
this self is not all she claims it to be.
The narcissistic character disorder is described in the DSM-III (The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) as having the
following characteristics: an inated sense of self-importance;
fantasies of unlimited success, fame, power, beauty, and perfect love
(uncritical adoration); exhibitionism (a need to be looked at and
admired); a tendency to feel rage with little objective cause; a
readiness to treat people with cool indierence as punishment for
hurtful treatment or as an indication of the fact they have no
current use for the person; a tendency toward severe feelings of
inferiority, shame, and emptiness; a sense of entitlement
accompanied by the tendency to exploit; a tendency to overidealize
or devalue people based largely on a narrow focus; an inability to
empathize.
This list is extensive but not all-inclusive. We are said to live in
the age of narcissism. Few of us are entirely free of its traits. It is in
our label, “the Me Generation,” and shows up in popular expressions
such as “What’s in it for me?” and “taking care of number one.”
Those who are philosophically inclined might ask which comes rst,
the narcissism of the individual or that of the society in which he is
formed. There probably is a point at which the ills and emphases of
a society and the neuroses of individuals living within it feed into a
common stream.
If society worships such external things as how you appear to
others, your status, power, and money, a person may acquire the
belief that what she keeps inside, her emotions and the deeds that
only she knows about, do not count. Yet the only real and lasting
sense of self-worth that a person can have is the feeling of and for
her essential self, the sense of being real, of doing what possibly she
alone thinks appropriate. Having an appreciation of the subjective
intangible is what we mean when we say that someone has
“character,” a rare trait today.
Applying the values of an externalized society to one’s self causes
narcissistic wounding. We use the word narcissistic to show that it is
self-love that is harmed. When self-love depends on externals, on
others’ opinions of what you are and do, the self is betrayed. A
woman who possesses great natural beauty was described by her
boastful mother in front of company as “beautiful as a movie star.”
When she heard these words, the daughter cringed in shame, feeling
herself to be worthless because she was only valued for her surface.
A healthy self has nothing to do with stardom. Psychological
health comes from acceptance starting in early infancy of all that
you are, good and bad, dirty and clean, naughty and nice, smart and
stupid. In the adult, health is manifested by an accord between
ideals and actions, by the ability to appreciate yourself for what you
attempt to do as well as for what succeeds. It means recognizing
that although you are not perfect you are still worthy of love.
In high school, coaches attempt to strengthen character by telling
their charges to do their best and to ignore whether the outcome is
win or lose. Our externalized society is so addicted to winning that
such advice is but a weak antidote to the pressure placed on
youngsters by hysterical parents, idealizing students, and the school
board, all of whose egos need a win to contradict a basically shaky
self-image.
To grow up to be a whole person, infants, toddlers, and children
in their formative stages need the experience of genuine acceptance;
they have to know that they are truly seen and yet are perfect and
lovable in their parents’ eyes; they need to stumble and sometimes
fall and to be greeted by a father’s or mother’s commiserating smile.
Through parental acceptance, children learn that their “is-ness,”
their essential selves, merit love. Self-love is learned through
identication. Positive self-regard is the opposite of what the
narcissist knows. He is “in love” with himself precisely because he
cannot love himself.
As a child, the narcissist-to-be found his essential self rejected by
his narcissistic parent. The wounds of the parent are a template for
the wounding of the child. Each narcissistic parent in each
generation repeats the crime that was perpetrated against him. The
crime is non-acceptance. The narcissist is more demanding and
deforming of the child he identies with more strongly, although all
his children are pulled into his web of subjectivity. How can he
accept ospring who are the product of his own unconsciously
despised self? His attitude is a variant of the Groucho Marx
Syndrome, “I would not join any club that would have me as its
member,” here transposed into “I would not love any child that
would have me as its parent.” The child has rejection as its
birthright.
The child who will eventually turn into a full-scale narcissist most
often had a narcissistic mother. The reason why the maternal
narcissist is more often likely to turn her child into a fellow
narcissist is because the mother most often provides the
predominant care that denes the baby’s early world. If the father is
narcissistic and the mother is not, the father’s traumatic impact is
attenuated at the time when the child is establishing a sense of self.
The narcissist-to-be turns away from a world he perceives as
devoid of nurturance and love (since a mother’s care gives the child
its rst version of the world). He withdraws into grandiose fantasies
to shield himself from profound feelings of unworthiness caused by
the fact that his mother does not really love him. Grandiosity
permits him to believe that he is complete and perfect unto himself,
thus shielding him from his secret sense that he is a ravening beast,
ready to murder others in order to eat and survive. The food of this
beast is admiration.
The narcissistic mother, caretaker of the child’s earliest years, is
grandiose, chronically cold but overprotective. She invades her
child’s autonomy and manipulates him to conform to her wishes.
She rejects all about him that she nds objectionable, putting him in
the anxiety-ridden position of losing her aection if he expresses
dissatisfaction. She responds to his baby rages and fussing with
anxiety, anger, or withdrawal. He becomes unable to cope with the
ugly feelings that threaten to erupt and destroy the bond between
him and his mother, the bond he depends on for survival.
His mother’s grandiosity models a way out of his dilemma. She
places him on a common throne, sharing the rareed air of her
greatness. By appropriating and embellishing the aura of specialness
in which she has enveloped him he can create a grandiose fantasy
about himself to escape to. This fantasy eventually crystallizes into a
psychic structure we call the grandiose self. A new narcissist is born.
For all his air of self-suciency, the narcissist is full of
interpersonal needs. He is more needy than most people who feel
they have something good inside of them. If he is to survive, he
must nd a way to get his needs met without acknowledging the
independent existence of the person o whom he wants to feed. To
admit that a person is necessary to him gets him in touch with
feelings of deciency, which plummet him into intolerable
emptiness, jealousy, and rage. To avoid this experience, he inhabits
a one-person world. Either he exists and other people are
extinguished or vice versa. In his mind, he is center stage and other
people are mere shadows beyond the proscenium. This solution
creates a new conundrum: “How can I get fed without
acknowledging the feeder?” The solution is to dissect people and to
turn them partially into objects, to make them inanimate. A person
comes to represent a need-fullling function or an organ like a
breast, vagina, or penis. There is no overall person to consider.
It is like living life in an automat in which various emotional
foods are displayed behind little glass windows, with one crucial
dierence. In this automat the customer does not have to pay. He is
entitled to eat. He remains aloof from people in his automat world.
Since he is not psychotic and totally out of touch with reality, he is
occasionally forced to recognize the presence of a benefactor. The
emotional incursion of such an idea is warded o by demeaning the
gift or the person who has given it. If a gift is unworthy he doesn’t
have to feel gratitude. Not to say that he does not at times proer
thanks. A narcissist can be quite charming when he wishes to
impress, but his words are not deeply felt.
He usually does not see the need to go to such lengths with his
family. They belong to him and are supposed to cater to his needs.
His children are particularly crushed by his lack of recognition for
their attempts at pleasing him since he is the main gure in their
world. Adding insult to injury, they can always count on his
criticism when what is oered falls below his standards.
Despite his bubble of grandiosity, the narcissist is remarkably
thin-skinned, forever taking oense and feeling mistreated,
especially when people appear to have eliminated the extras in their
response to him. Less than special immediately implies that
someone may be thinking the emperor is naked, precisely what he
fears. He is enraged whenever the aching corns of his insecurities
are stepped on.
He is wounded when the child he deems special fails to live up to
expectations, reacting with a rage one might have for a limb that
has failed to provide support. His children and his mate learn how
to soothe him by propping up his grandiosity, and the special child
learns not to let him down.
A narcissist tends to have transient social relationships since few
wish to abide by her rules. She has quick enthusiasms, business
associates but few friends. Her closest are other narcissists who keep
a comfortable distance while exchanging gestures of mutual
admiration. Neither makes emotional demands on the other.
In a mate, if she does not choose a fellow narcissist, she will
cohabit with a person who feels inadequate and who needs to hide
in a relationship. This suits her well since she doesn’t want to
recognize the existence of another being. Often, her mate is the
child of a narcissist, already indoctrinated to regard exploitation and
disregard as love. Others lured by the narcissistic aura are those in
whom healthy childhood exhibitionism has been repressed. The
period of healthy exhibitionism nds the little boy showing o his
muscles to Mom, who is supposed to be properly impressed, and
nds the little girl ouncing her new dress before Dad to court his
admiration. If the parent puts the child to shame for showing o,
the need for attention gets repressed into the unconscious.
Repression means that the need is not satised and continues to
press for expression in the adult without her being aware of it. The
repressed adult may select an exhibitionistic mate to achieve
vicarious satisfaction.
It should be understood that the narcissistic personality represents
a serious malfunction, something that might be labeled an illness
under the medical model. Since the medical model does not really
describe human personality, a better measure of narcissistic
tendencies might be the degree to which the individual is able to be
truly productive and loving. A narcissist may be productive
professionally but often is held back by his or her fear of being less
than perfect. Such a concern can truncate creativity and certainly
undermine relationships.
The grandiose narcissist in her automat world may not feel the
emptiness of her life, although her narcissistic traits cause suering
in all those with whom she has intimate contact. She only comes to
recognize that something is wrong (not necessarily with herself)
when the environment no longer supports her grand illusions and
she fails to live up to expectations of greatness. At this time she may
become depressed and seek psychotherapy to relieve the pain.
The narcissist who hopes to change through analytic
psychotherapy will nd that treatment is not easy. The process must
be arduous because it requires that she admit to human failings; that
she recognize the need for other people, who have the choice to give
or not to give (you cannot commandeer love). It means once more
experiencing the feelings of being a helpless and manipulated child
who sustained considerable damage at the hands of unloving
parents. She will have to see the emptiness of a life compulsively
controlled by the need for admiration and ostentatious achievement.
The outcome of her struggle to uncover an authentic self will be the
ability to lead an ordinary life, one with real joys and sorrows, not
the ctitious pleasures of a mirrored image.
2
WHO IS THE ADULT CHILD OF A NARCISSIST?
Not all children of narcissists are
identical but most share from a pool of common traits. The extent to
which they manifest problems specic to having a narcissistic
parent depends upon the degree of severity of the parent’s
narcissism and the presence or absence of ameliorating inuences in
the child’s life. These would include loving grandparents who are
frequently around, interested teachers or other adults who can
understand the child’s plight.
Unfortunately, one reason a narcissistic home can be so
destructive is that narcissists tend to be very insular, having only a
few close friends who are also narcissists, equally insensitive to the
needs and feelings of children. Others drawn to a narcissist are
themselves children of narcissists, too mesmerized by the replay of
their early childhood relationship to take an autonomous position
with regard to her children.
Nor would she allow it. The narcissist rules the emotional
atmosphere of her home. She establishes an airtight reality from
which her children have little chance of escaping. Those children
whose parents separate can fare better if they live with the
nonnarcissistic or less narcissistic parent. This often does happen, as
the narcissist rarely wants the nuts-and-bolts responsibility of
rearing her children.
She wants to be there on special occasions when she can make a
showy gesture. She will bring a present, rent a sailboat, tell
remarkable stories about her accomplishments and turn herself into
a heroine. Against this display, the daily ministrations of the other
parent fade into obscurity. Often, it is only as an adult, or when the
grown child becomes a parent himself, that the contribution and
loving spirit of the nonnarcissistic parent is recognized.
A child living in a home separate from the narcissistic parent is
only occasionally bathed in the icy sea of his or her parent’s peculiar
world view. Even so, the narcissistic parent, who is loved, needed,
and identied with by her child, must have a profound eect.
The peculiar view espoused by the narcissistic parent is that her
child as an independent being does not count. Here are two
examples of how narcissistic parents could not relate to the real
needs of their children.
A young woman just out of college, living on an extremely limited
budget, asked her socialite mother for a vacuum cleaner for her
birthday. Her mother agreed. When the date arrived, her daughter
received an expensive gift certicate to a fancy hair salon for “the
works.” Wild with frustration (and able to express her feelings after
several years of therapy), she asked why she hadn’t been given the
gift that was promised. Her mother answered in the aggrieved tone
of one who has been unfairly attacked. “But that’s what I thought
you needed, dear.” It was impossible for the mother to understand
why her gift was not altogether loving. The mother had given her
daughter the gift that she herself would have wanted.
In the second example, a narcissistic mother again pleased only
herself, being unable to appreciate the age-appropriate interests of
her children. She took her two youngsters to Paris, where she
cooped them up all day in a hotel room while she went on a buying
spree in the fabric houses. She returned in the late afternoon, to nd
two bored and angry children who demanded gifts for having been
good. She felt unjustly attacked by the “little ingrates.” Had she not
brought them to this wonderful city of charm and culture which she
had been out enjoying all day? They should have been able to
appreciate it through her own experience, apparently through
osmosis.
Osmotic expectations are extremely common in narcissists since
they do not recognize the psychological boundaries between
themselves and their children. The children should be as happy as
they or, on other occasions, as miserable. If the child is happy when
the parent is sad, it is taken as a sign of disloyalty and insensitivity.
The mother on her buying spree felt that her children should have
been overjoyed knowing that their backsides would soon rest on
wonderful Parisian upholstery fabric. How could they be so
unappreciative of all the eorts she had made on their behalf!
The child of a narcissist is never seen as she truly is. Even before
birth, the parent has attributed characteristics to the child which
jibe with the fulminating needs of his unconscious. After birth, the
child is maimed by endless attempts to improve her. She is found
intrinsically unlovable and defective because she is born of a parent
who feels horribly insucient (although he can’t admit it) and who
unconsciously puts this label not on himself but on his child. The
child can be attacked and corrected without the parent recognizing
that he himself is the target.
The pressure from a narcissist to conform to expectations is like
the water in which a sh swims, so relentless and uniform that the
child is hardly aware of it. Struggles are infrequent while the
process of shaping is going on. Of course, there are moments when
the child feels mentally assaulted and may ght or cry, but even
then she also feels bad, wrong, and confused. She feels what the
parent indicates she should feel, since her shortcomings are a
shameful disappointment to the parent. To be included under the
parent’s umbrella of grandiosity, the child must exhibit pure
excellence in whatever the parent deems important. Otherwise she
is pushed out.
Proper teaching involves the concept of improving functioning,
something external to the self, not improving the inner person,
which must be seen as intrinsically acceptable. Identication of the
inner child with the behavior or the product of her behavior
damages her self-esteem. She comes to believe that even if she does
succeed she is merely gold over shit, the facade of beauty over true
ugliness. The “successful” child of a narcissist feels like a fake since
the true self is identied with failure.
Children of narcissists emerge from this crucible with a common
and most serious problem. They feel that they do not have the right
to exist. Their selves have been twisted out of their natural shape
since any movement toward independence is treated as a betrayal
and something that can cause the parent irreparable harm.
The narcissistic parent’s philosophy of rationalized self-interest
prevents the child from understanding why he feels guilty about
having autonomous motives. The narcissistic parent’s principle,
“You don’t count,” means the child’s eort to be seen as an
individual is worthy of consideration, if only for trying to
understand that her problems are felt by the parent to be an act of
treason. The child’s move toward autonomy is greeted by the
parent’s pain, resentment, and anger, from which the child learns
that becoming a separate person is wrong.
A narcissist attempts to dene his children’s reality. He tells them
what they are feeling and thinking, in contradiction to what they
really do feel and think. For example, a father responded to his child
who had just exclaimed, “I hate Grandma” (the narcissist’s cold and
narcissistic mother) by saying “You don’t hate Grandma. Only a bad
child could hate such a wonderful Grandma. You love Grandma.”
This statement created vast conict and confusion in the child’s
mind. The child was experiencing what is known in the vernacular
as “mind fucking.” He was being trained to distrust the reality of his
thoughts and to allow others to think for him.
Because the narcissistic parent contradicts his child’s perception
of his own feelings and thoughts, the child grows up confused and
tries to establish relationships with people who think for him as a
continuation of his childhood experiences.
The narcissistic press for symbiotic unity requires that the
perceptions of the child and parent be identical. In the example
given above, the parent is attempting to keep away his own feelings
of rage toward his mother.
Since the child is the carrier of the narcissistic parent’s perceived
but rejected imperfections and grandiose fantasies, his self-image is
disturbingly contradictory. He is a miserable failure who will never
accomplish anything and must live his life in the shadows. He also is
capable of total perfection and glory. His contradictory views of
himself reect the outer shell and the inner core of the narcissistic
parent’s self-view.
Whatever the parent feels is his or her problem is transplanted
into the child. A narcissistic woman needs to be the most beautiful
of all but fears that she is ugly. When this parent thinks that she
lacks any other value, her child will be seen as an ugly failure and
subjected to an endless campaign of reform to obtain some worth.
A narcissistic man obsessed with intelligence wants to be thought
a genius, while secretly fearing he is an idiot. He sees idiocy in his
child and persecutes the child into pretending to be a genius to
cover up his idiocy. The entire problem has been transplanted.
Ironically, the child may be extremely bright but can’t fully use that
intelligence nor take credit for it because he believes that he is only
an idiot acting like a genius.
A child’s sense of self-worth is damaged by false labeling. The
more exaggerated his personal label, the less he feels his intrinsic
worth. Like olives in a jar, he is summed up and his qualities
exaggerated with little regard for the truth. With olives, the word
great is used to designate very small fruit. The more a person’s
worth is exaggerated the smaller he feels. False labeling destroys
one’s sense of worth. All is for show. The narcissistic parent also
feels imprisoned by the label he has placed on his child. He feels
painted in turn by the image he has given the child and is always
trying to raise the image’s assigned value.
The child’s inner self, which requires unconditional love, is
treated as identical with his external behavior and his products. The
child is subjected to a barrage of criticism which he eventually
comes to believe. It isn’t that his paper is well written—he is a
genius. It isn’t that he didn’t understand a certain theorem in
geometry—he is an idiot. The narcissistic parent frames his
comments in such a way that the child’s inner self is implicated. As
a result, the child cannot be objective about what he does and
cannot utilize criticism eectively. It hurts too much to take it in.
Consequently, he often has serious problems with performance.
There are many ways of hiding. Some choose inarticulateness. Their
thinking cannot be evaluated through the murk. Others cultivate the
“fudge factor,” a messy way of writing so that the teacher cannot
read responses. The child can later argue that he meant something
else. As an adult, he may act superior and throw out esoteric
references as a smoke screen, counting on the fact that people tend
to revere as superior that which they cannot understand.
Others fearing to try their wings are content to show early
promise and to live with the belief that they could be great (and win
their parents’ love) if they ever applied themselves, which they dare
not do. They might have a great natural tennis swing but they will
never practice. The fantasy of approval for what they might do is
preferable to the reality of possible rejection for what they can do.
The child who is continually warned about a dire end is being
impregnated with the narcissistic parent’s warded-o impulses and
almost inevitably will eat of the forbidden fruit. A parent who
repeatedly predicted that his daughter would “end up in the gutter”
for being cute and sexy, by his verbalized lack of faith in her
common sense put pressure on her to conform to his expectations by
harming herself. Her promiscuity caused him pain and pleasure,
which upset and gratied his daughter as well. She was unaware
that her sexual acting out represented loving submission to his
wishes as evinced by his prediction.
Many children of narcissists turn out rather paranoid. They
develop hair-trigger sensitivity to anything that might be perceived
as an attack, whenever someone commits an error, omission, or
blunder that aects them. They are aected when they need not be,
believing that people are deliberately out to hurt them. Life can be
quite unbearable, as they always nd themselves the targets of other
people’s bad moments. Repeatedly attacked by the narcissistic
parent, they have come to believe that they were to blame for his or
her moods. The experience of being a target is later extended and
generalized to the responses of spouses, friends, children, rude cab
drivers, people who squeeze them out of seats on subways, and the
drunks who call out dirty names as they walk by.
Having learned to accept without question the opinions of the
narcissistic parent, the child often transfers this onto the world in
the form of a pervasive or specic-to-certain-situations gullibility.
She can be manipulated by someone who speaks with authority
even if the supporting evidence is lacking. She may fall prey to the
seductive power of cults, wherever love is promised for surrender.
Her choice of friends will tend toward the narcissistic, people who
demand uncritical acceptance. She assumes her familiar role at their
feet, the one who listens without being listened to; the one who
laughs but doesn’t get to tell a joke; the one who calls but never is
called. She arranges her life around their schedules. Friendships are
frustrating and unfullling, not unlike the relationship with her
narcissistic parent, but she does not know any other way. She is in
the grip of a compulsion psychologists call transference, still trying
to win the narcissist’s love.
She does not know how to protect her interests since she was
called selsh by her parents if ever she put her needs ahead of
theirs. Loving meant total selessness, giving the loved one
whatever he or she wanted without resentment, competitiveness, or
jealousy, even if giving harmed the giver. She was to make the other
person happy. Children of narcissists can be a remarkably unselsh
breed.
All children need love to survive. If there is no real aection, the
child will interpret what attention the parent does oer as love. If
all the child receives is criticism, then criticism is interpreted as love
and the behavior the parent criticized will be repeated. If the child
was only attended to for being slow, sloppy, lazy, careless, etc., all
passive-aggressive traits, then these will be retained into adulthood.
That is how maladaptive behavior can become ingrained and cause
all kinds of diculty in later life.
Since children of narcissists feel so bad about themselves, they
often develop characteristics of the skunk, objectionable behaviors
that drive people away. By being oensive, they avoid the pain of
getting close.
As painful as early rejection and loneliness can be, the skunk
person prefers to control the rejection. To bring this about, he
becomes such things as an obnoxious interrupter, a borrower who
forgets to repay, sloppy, unkempt, or smelly. He commits a
thousand oenses and by doing so and getting rejected for these,
preserves the hope that his real self might be loved if ever he
eliminated the provocation. He defers seeking love until the future.
Bombarded by evaluations and labels that are not appropriate to
him, the child of a narcissist does not know what is real and what is
not. He does not know who he is and is prohibited from
experimenting through trial and error to nd out. The child who
was constantly told “You’re no good,” ends up feeling just that. He
is what they say—bad, ugly, stupid, and an embarrassment to
others. The narcissistic parent who so often suered from shame for
personal shortcomings in the eyes of his scornful parents looks at his
own child with disgust and subjects him to the scorn he once knew.
He masters the trauma of his own early experience by taking the
active role and doing it to another as helpless as he once was.
The child is raised to mockery, nasty laughter, a nger pointed in
accusation, expressions of disgust and rejection. The outcome of so
much shaming is that the child shrinks away from contact. He seeks
invisibility to feel safe. Grown up, such a person will live behind
and through people but never out front for himself. The exposure of
his inner being is too threatening.
He grows up feeling unlovable, since he has been taught that not
having been loved is his fault. At best, his acceptance was
conditional. A straight-? student whose grades are boasted about at
a party by his narcissistic mother feels like a gilded bird in a gilded
cage. It is not he who is appreciated.
The narcissistic parent lives on within the mind of the adult, even
in the absence of the real parent. This inner parent is known as an
introject. It keeps reinforcing childhood roles and behaviors
acquired for survival. The introject still threatens to withhold love if
the child departs from its program. There is no place to run to, no
geographical hiding place to get away from this harsh inner voice.
The child of a narcissist grown has the job of rooting out the
inuence of the inner parent by careful examination and analysis.
A nal and tragic irony is that the child of a narcissist may
himself have acquired many narcissistic traits, up to and including
being a full-blooded narcissist. Some common features might
include: self-centeredness, the compulsive need to be right and to
have other people submit to his views, an inability to take criticism,
the desire for perfection in self or in others he is close to,
hypersensitivity combined with the continuous feeling of being
mistreated, an exaggerated need for acclaim and support, and an
even more desperate need for reassurance that he is loved.
In a home where the narcissistic parent was sadistic and his
spouse or child the victim, the child of a narcissist may emulate the
sadistic role since this is what was perceived as powerful. Children
do not know that there are possibilities other than those
demonstrated by Mom and Dad and so sometimes select the role
that appears to be less hopeless. The adult child may victimize his
spouse, children, friends, and employees. He may even victimize
himself, attacking his own weaknesses with the hateful savagery of
the internalized narcissistic parent.
It is extremely painful for the child of a narcissist to discover that
he has become what he hates, that he has incorporated from his
narcissistic parent the very traits that hurt him the most. We do not
like to see such things in ourselves. Sometimes, the child of a
narcissist develops a blind spot about his behavior, not unlike the
parent who also cannot see the truth. Nevertheless, if the child of a
narcissist wishes to achieve autonomy and self-respect, such traits
must be greatly reduced and interpersonal sensitivity developed.
In the stories that follow, we shall see how various children of
narcissists have struggled with these issues.
3
THEY MAKE YOU CONFORM TO THEIR WILL, EVEN IN
YOUR THINKING
The power of the narcissist’s inuence
permeates everything with which the child has contact. It becomes
automatic for the child to conform to the parent’s viewpoint in
order to avoid disapproval. A narcissist disagreed with tends to
either attack or withdraw. Either response would threaten a child.
The habit of agreeing with the parent becomes ingrained. Even a
grown child with some intellectual grasp of the parent’s dictatorial
and twisted approach can still nd herself abandoning her own
perceptions and goals and joining the parent. This collusion is a
kind of emotional ashback brought on by parental pressure.
The childhood habit of conformity has been reactivated. Once the
child has shifted from her own point of view to that of the parent,
she may feel quite out of touch with her self without understanding
why. Having abandoned her own position, she nds herself in a no-
man’s-land. Her mental paralysis is seized upon by the parent as an
opportunity to extend his control. The parent calls the shots and the
adult child goes along in confused submission, like a prisoner of war
who has been partially brainwashed. She gives the desired responses
as long as she is prompted by her jailer.
For those adult children who have developed a fairly autonomous
self, submission occurs mainly in the presence of the narcissistic
parent. For those who have not developed sucient autonomy, this
submissive behavior will go on throughout life, in response to both
the negative inner parent and the pressures of the real parent.
The following story is an example of a short-lived regression to
the experience of confused submission.
This piece was written with my father in mind. I imagine him
looking over my shoulder saying, “What the hell are you doing? You
know you can’t write.”
The story given below is my own, that of a person who has been
working on herself for a long time and is reasonably aware of her
parent’s diculties. It shows how I succumbed to the narcissist’s
pressure, although I recovered soon afterward and gained insight
into what had happened.
Imagine being raised in a room in which all the walls are
distorted. Instead of being rectangular they are trapezoidal, and
they continually change their shapes ever so slightly. The only
window is a narrow slit set high up and containing distorting glass.
Whatever can be seen through this glass appears hazy and indistinct.
This is what happens to your perception of reality when you live
with a narcissistic parent. Not only do narcissists see things
idiosyncratically, at deviance from reality, which is common in all
disturbed people, but they insist that you see things this way too.
They insist because every dierence in your perception is
experienced as an attack upon themselves. They methodically wipe
out their children’s attempts to develop their own perceptions.
The following is an example of what happens when I regress into
allowing myself to be manipulated by my father. He and his wife
were in Florida for the winter months. In his last phone call to me,
he said that my eighty-eight-year-old Aunt Sara, who lives in an old-
age home, was failing. He said that she was “giving up” and no
longer cared to live in a body that refused to obey her, that she had
sunk into herself and would not respond to speech or touch. My
father said that when the will to live is abandoned, death often
follows. He said that I “would of course want to see [my] aunt while
she is still alive.” I agreed to come as soon as possible.
Aunt had been struggling with progressive Parkinson’s disease for
the last few years. Now she was unable to speak except for
occasional bursts of sound when she was excited. She was conned
to a wheelchair, strapped in against her will. Aunt Sara had always
been a cantankerous, rebellious sort and so had fought the necessity
of learning to use a walker properly, picking it up with two hands,
pushing it ahead of her, and advancing step by step. Parkinson’s had
made her unsteady on her feet but she wouldn’t give in to it. She
would stagger along wildly, clutching the oending walker over her
head in one hand. As one might expect, she had several nasty falls,
resulting in blackened eyes, black-and-blue chins, and, eventually, a
broken rib. The old-age home refused to take responsibility for her if
she insisted on walking about as she did, so she was unwillingly
strapped into a wheelchair. On one occasion, she was discovered
sawing away at her restraining straps with a knife she had secreted
from the dining hall. Unable to walk, unable to speak, unable to
write, and eighty-eight years old, she lived in a chronic, bottomless
despair.
Paul, her henpecked husband, as despised as he had been needed,
had died seven years earlier. This had made it imperative that Sara
go into a home. It is not unusual for all members of one family to be
narcissistic to some degree, and so Aunt Sara had the narcissist’s
hatred of her husband because she depended upon him. The eorts
of the slave must not be noticed while he gives royalty its due.
When it came to mates, Sara knew that she could have done better.
Nevertheless, she was not a consummate narcissist like my father.
She was capable of aection and concern, and had demonstrated
these to me, her niece, in the many years we had lived in kitty-
corner apartments in the same building. As a little girl, I and my dog
had visited Aunt and Uncle almost every night, while she fed me
sugar cookies, her stand against my tyrannical mother, who wanted
to control my every move. This made me uncomfortable at the times
when I was feeling loyal to my mother. I accompanied my aunt,
who brushed my hair, gossiped with me, and was a xture in my
life. No, I could not let her die unacknowledged. I made reservations
to go despite an extremely busy schedule that would only allow me
to stay the weekend.
My father exists in a rigidly structured routine in which the
central, controlling factor, as one would expect with a narcissist, is
himself. He has embarked upon a writing program that has
consumed most of his time for the last ten years. His schedule is as
follows: up at eight, exercise for forty-ve minutes, breakfast served
by wife (who has already eaten), write until lunch, eat lunch, write
until four, stop, go for a half-hour run, return and take a nap, get up
and have dinner served by wife (who has already eaten); watch TV
and read at the same time, or lecture to wife on political topics.
Father’s wife goes to bed before him. He reads until 2:00 A.M. and
then goes to sleep. The next day the routine is repeated. Time spent
trying to please wife by meeting her needs: nil. In order to be with
him, she must type his manuscripts, cook and serve his meals, listen
to his political analyses, making only slight attempts to disagree
with him on minor points, so as to maintain the illusion of being a
separate person. She is shy about asking for what she wants,
especially for nonsexual aection. He needs to think that all he does
is ne with her. Naturally submissive, she sometimes complains
about his selshness, but mainly accepts it and goes on.
When Father’s wife expressed a desire for such things as
pleasurable outings, her ideas were dismissed as the workings of an
immature mind. He scorned her as though she were a child, his
characteristic way of demeaning a woman. He was engaged in more
important things than the frivolous pursuit of entertainment.
When his wife railed against his rigidity and his unwillingness to
deviate from his program for her, he refused to speak to her for
days. He has threatened to leave her. One wonders how he would
survive without her services. Typically, she practices an unconscious
self-censorship, choosing to view him as a superior man above petty
needs and vices. Her need to lose herself in a partner ts in with his
own need to obliterate the dierences between them.
Father’s rigid schedule is not entirely a concomitant of his
narcissism but also represents an attempt to remain organized
despite some brain damage received in a car accident many years
before. Yet his schedule is pursued with all the self-centeredness of a
narcissist. It follows that although he lives a mere twenty minutes
from his older sister languishing in a nursing home, he sees her but
once a week for an hour. A day-care worker was engaged to spend a
few hours a day with Sara, to stimulate and amuse her. “That is
enough socialization for her,” Father had declared. He thinks
himself quite dedicated and loving for that once-a-week break in his
work schedule.
I arrived at the airport in Florida at 1:00 A.M. and was in my
father’s apartment by 2:00 A.M. True to form, he was waiting up for
me. His wife sprang awake unnecessarily. She emerged from the
bedroom to ply me with food in the intrusive way she employs to
show her egoless love. All I wanted was to end the social chatter
and go to sleep. I was exhausted.
Early next morning, I got out before anyone had awakened, to run
and take a swim. I dallied a while at the beach. This was my time
alone. When I returned to the apartment, my father’s wife snapped,
“Where were you? You were away so long.” The slave resents
another’s freedom without recognizing the source of her pique.
“Swimming, running, like always,” I said. It was my morning
routine whenever I visited them. She knew that.
My father spoke. Now we have the moment of the body snatchers,
the moment when the daughter surrenders her personhood in order
to become an acceptable extension of the all-knowing one. “When
would you like to see Sara? Today or tomorrow?” I could write a
scenario around what I should have answered. I could have said, “I
want to see her on both days for several hours. You and I can do
things together during the time that’s left over.” If my father
objected to driving me, I could have said, “I’ll borrow your car or
take a taxi or a bus. I don’t need to disturb your schedule.” But
that’s not what happened. My father said, “Let’s go today. The day is
already shot as far as doing anything else. Tomorrow we can take a
real trip to the Everglades or the Monkey Jungle.” His wife looked
happy at the prospect of an outing. “We can bring your Aunt Betty.”
“Let’s do that,” I said.
A fog was settling around me. I felt as though I were observing
my actions from a great distance, moving my arms and legs as if
drugged or as if moving upstream in water. My center and purpose
were dissolving. I was being steered by outside forces. At the back
of my mind I had the idea that tomorrow I would renegotiate. I put
the issue o. It was impossible to cope. I even began to anticipate
the pleasure of a trip to the Everglades. The blinders were on now
and I was looking in the desired direction. “OK. Let’s go see her
today.” So it was decided. Everyone was happy. Father had his 2:00
P.M. lunch, keeping everyone waiting as usual, and we were o to
the nursing home.
We parked in the lot in front of the handsome Spanish-style two-
story building. The seeing-eye automatically opened the doors to let
us pass through into a beautiful inner garden, profuse with
owering plants and huge, ancient banyan trees. Everywhere there
were people, the elderly with canes or wheelchairs, their attendants
and guests. But Aunt Sara was nowhere to be seen. We went inside
and took the elevator to the fourth oor. Upstairs, the wheelchairs
were lined up against a divider topped with plants in front of the
entrance to the dining room. Eating was probably the bright spot in
their day.
The old people all looked terribly frail, expressionless, almost
transparent. I didn’t know where to look for my aunt. Was she lying
comatose on her bed? Father was scrutinizing the denizens in their
wheelchairs. He approached one who was terribly out of it, her head
drooping on her chest. What a sorry human specimen.
It was my aunt. I had forgotten that my aunt had stopped dying
her hair jet black. Aunt had always been such a pretty woman,
nothing like this huddled, gray rag doll. My father put his hands on
his sister’s head, gently, with a kind expression. The head raised
itself up and looked about. It was Sara. All kinds of feelings welled
up. Pity, horror, and deep love. “Sara,” I exclaimed, and gave her a
huge hug and a kiss. Tears lled my eyes and spilled down my
cheeks. Sara’s eyes also lled and she had a big smile on her face.
Her eyes were opened wide with excitement. We held on to each
other’s hands as she was wheeled down to the garden. Now Sara
was rooted in time. She knew the hour and the day. An event was
occurring to mark it. She was relating.
We found a nice spot under the shade of a banyan tree and drew
up wire garden chairs. “Which side do you want me to sit on, Sara?
Which side is your good ear?” Unexpectedly, Sara spoke, sarcastic
and wry as ever. “Who knows? You choose.” Everyone crowed with
pleasure. Sara’s speech was a triumph. I sat on my aunt’s left side. A
few more words, however, and my aunt’s vocal chords stopped
responding. But the joy of being together remained. We tried
writing. Here, too, my aunt’s hand held out for a few words, then
trailed o in a spastic scrawl like the EKG markings of someone
having a heart attack. She wrote Paul in tiny, controlled letters, the
name of her dead husband. Perhaps she missed him after all. So
many years together, he attentive, she rejecting. He had given her
his life. “I know, Sara,” I said. She wrote Art, the name of her dead
brother.
Here we have another aspect of the narcissistic relationship.
When Sara was put into an old-age home, her narcissist brother, my
father, no longer accorded her the rights of someone in full
possession of her faculties, or perhaps his need to dominate simply
increased. One right of the elderly is to attend funerals; sister
following brother, friend following friend, until no one is left.
My father had declared that Sara was not to know of their brother
Art’s death. “It would kill her,” he said. She was treated like some
kind of idiot, unable to gure out why her brother had never
suciently recovered from a long illness to call or write. I had
thought Aunt Sara should know her brother’s fate. She needed to be
at the funeral like everyone else, to share the healing words of the
mourners: “…so sad…I remember…we are left…” I had been
dragged into the conspiracy against my will. The lies were already
told before I had been consulted.
I wrote the word gone next to Art’s name. She did not seem to
understand, as there was no visible response. Perhaps she could not
read my handwriting. By writing this, I had crossed my father,
contradicting one of the laws of the narcissist, namely: “I know
what’s best for you even if it includes depriving you of your
humanity and your human needs, including the right to know and to
make up your own mind.” Art-gone. What would my father think? It
had just slipped out and it was too late now to take it back. I hoped
that Aunt Sara would know that I was trying to relate to her as a full
human being.
Now Sara’s handwriting was extinguished. But we were still
together. We had communicated for a while and I knew that there
was still a brain and a heart. Sara was sitting, smiling, very present,
not the idiot child amidst normal children. We looked around. There
was not a person to be seen. No wheelchairs or walkers, no nurses
or aides, no strolling elderly people and their guests. Time had
own. Everyone had gone inside to eat. It was time to part.
My father dictated a nal message for me to write to my aunt,
some kind of instruction for her to hold on to in the intervening
months—something about the way she should think or live. But I
wanted to leave a message of my own and I didn’t want my father to
read it. He had a way of demeaning the purity of feelings with his
manipulations. He was a spoiler of other people’s sentiments,
probably because he was incapable of real feeling himself. Perhaps
he was jealous.
I wrote, “Take good care of yourself, Sara. I shall write to you.” I
wrote, “I love you,” and tucked the piece of paper into my aunt’s
restraining belly strap. The last moments to see the prisoner. Sara
was wheeled to the door of the dining room. I feared that the aide
would pin the note to Sara’s mirror where my father would see it,
and that he would later say something to me about it.
I kissed my aunt good-bye, not wanting to let go of her small
hand. “Good-bye, Aunt Sara,” I said, thinking that perhaps it was for
the last time. My father’s narcissistic glue continued to paralyze my
will. It was easier this way, not to have another encounter with
inevitable mortality. Hide your eyes. Have fun instead.
The next day we went to the Monkey Jungle; my father, his wife,
and her sister, my Aunt Betty, wife of the now dead Art. In the car,
my father dominated the conversation with his version of the ght
they were having with the co-op board. His wife waed, taking rst
one side, then the other. She was incapable of holding a position
since it might cause someone to dislike her. She found this
intolerable. My father was infuriated that her loyalty to him was not
absolute. He produced an extremely loud, strident, and remarkable
torrent of words. A musician friend who played the trumpet had
once said that my father had mastered the art of circular breathing
so that he could take in air even as he was speaking. No one could
interrupt him. If anyone tried, they were angrily told to wait until
he had nished. We were his captive audience, his slaves. I felt
stung by the sharpness of his tongue even though I shared his
opinion of the board’s pusillanimous behavior. Most of me was in a
deadened state, even as I went through the motions of joining in the
chatter. It was his show now.
Monday morning I took an extremely early cab to the airport.
Something inside me felt wrong, but what was it? My father kissed
me a tender good-bye, asking me if I had had a good time. “Of
course,” I said, not wanting to hurt him. “I’m glad that I came.”
At the airport, I got into a ght with an Eastern Airlines
employee. There was only half an hour until ight time and there
was a huge line at the ticket counter. “I already have my ticket,” I
said. “What gate do I go to for La Guardia?” The woman, walking
down the line, counting, kept her back turned and said nothing.
“What gate do I need?” I repeated. Still no response; her head
remained averted. I tapped her on the shoulder with my ticket
holder. “Please tell me what gate to go to.” She whirled around,
saying, “Don’t you strike me.” “I was just trying to get your
attention,” I said. “The next person you do that to will strike you
back. She won’t be nice like me,” she said. I was boiling. “You’re not
nice. In fact, you’re quite rude and if you keep this up, I am going to
report you.” The girl spat out, “Gate twenty-three.” I set o at a run,
thinking that the girl had been spoiling for a ght. But so was I.
Why was I so angry?
On the plane I calculated: I had spent $290 for the ticket, $45 to
put my car in long-term parking, $21 for cabfare back to the airport,
$12 for the Red Top jitney upon my arrival. That made a total of
$366. A lot of money to see my aunt for one hour.
It hit me hard. I had been entirely co-opted. The trip had been
almost in vain. Rage and then depression ooded me. How could I
have allowed this to happen? Although I was angry at him, it wasn’t
even my father’s fault. He was just being himself, like a force of
nature. I had gone into the lion’s den without a whip, into the desert
without a compass. I had been emotionally unprepared and as a
result, once the force eld had been turned on, I had reverted to the
little girl’s posture I had always taken, the role my father imposes
on all women, that of thoughtless, frightened obedience. Poor Sara,
with her one-hour visit. If not today, then tomorrow, her chin would
be back upon her chest. I could not aord another trip soon. This
one had been spent with monkeys. Perhaps the next one would be
too late.
In this story, we see the interaction between the narcissistic
parent and a grown child, one with considerable ego strength and
awareness. Nevertheless this child, myself, succumbed to her
father’s egocentric philosophy and once more entered the distorting
trapezoidal room. I forgot how to exert my will, lost my intention
and purpose, and was incapable of reviewing my options. For a brief
spell, I entered the obedient limbo of the inauthentic life whose
main reward is not to be attacked or rejected by the narcissistic
parent. Once away from him, I soon recovered. Unfortunately, not
soon enough to have a full visit with my aunt or to make a proper
farewell.
Next time, I will go down to see my aunt without telling my
father that I am there. To conde such a plan to a person who is
hypersensitive but blind to the needs of others when he will surely
disagree causes unnecessary diculties for both parties, since the
narcissist must always be right.
4
ANNE AND THE INVISIBLE FORCE
Even a person who has worked for
many years in therapy may have to struggle with the invisible force
that is the emanation of the negative inner parent continually trying
to control the adult child’s actions. The child part of the adult mind
refuses to surrender its wish to win the love of the internalized
narcissistic parent. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, it
continues to believe that such love is possible. It is this desire and
belief that keeps alive the power of the negative inner parent.
To please this inner parent, the adult must be what the narcissistic
parent seemed to require. An adult might suspect that she is falling
under the power of the negative introject any time her behavior
seems to be veering in a direction counter to her adult aims. It is a
likely explanation for otherwise inexplicable feelings of inadequacy
and inferiority, especially when attempting to accomplish
something. The negative inner parent undermines adult
eectiveness in the same way the narcissistic parent undermined the
child in order to “accept” her.
There is an ongoing war between the adult nding her way in life
and her childish part still under the sway of the negative introject.
The adult part can prevail if the person learns to recognize that the
messages of this inner parent are wrong. These messages tell the
person that she doesn’t have what it takes to make it in the real
world. The inner parent withdraws its support if the adult persists in
her eorts. This leads to severe anxiety, depression, and feelings of
abandonment.
If the person believes the messages of her negative inner parent,
she surrenders real life for the reward of living according to
childhood rules and the fantasized satisfaction of parental love.
Due to the undermining of her ego, the child of a narcissist is
easily discouraged by real-life diculties. The negative inner parent
distorts reality to prove its point about the person’s inadequacy and
the person believes its message. In Anne’s story, we see a woman
struggling with the invisible force, the power of her negative
introject. The outcome of this struggle will depend upon her skill in
detecting the workings of the invisible force and her determination
to root out its inuence. Every child of a narcissist must develop his
or her will if he or she is to recover.
Anne and I speak about her inability to nish the projects she has
started. She is full of despair, aware that this problem touches every
aspect of her life. The symptom of incompleteness even appears in
our interview, as when she interrupts a painful recounting of how
her mother failed to help her at a time when she was sick to admire
my earrings, completely forgetting what she was talking about. Her
lighthearted prattle and myriad time-consuming, seemingly
unavoidable chores cover up what is really going on. Anne is not
allowed to achieve if her objective is of personal benet.
She takes me downstairs to see her daughter’s playroom, a huge
nished basement looking out onto a lawn. Every inch of the room
is strewn with toys or some parts thereof, games, puzzles, and
objects to climb on or into. The chaos is striking. The whole room
looks like a Mattel toy showroom after a saboteur has thrown a
bomb. Anne says sadly, “I keep meaning to clean it up, but all I do is
keep looking at it.” Each day, looking at the disorganized playroom
without doing anything about it reinforces the message she gives
herself of her impotence.
The overabundance of toys hints at other issues. If the child is
inundated with things, it may indicate that Anne cannot set limits. If
she cannot say no, she will feel angry and frustrated at things
getting out of hand. One can easily picture her daughter amidst
these mounds of toys, so many that she cannot develop an
attachment to a favorite. If one gets broken or a part is lost, she
moves on to another, overstimulated yet unsatised.
Another reason for oering so many toys is that such a profusion
will keep the child from developing a favorite and leave the mother
as number one. A parent who so much fears the loss of her child’s
aection suers from profound insecurity.
I ask Anne about her giving. She says that she was deprived in
childhood and she is trying to keep her child from knowing that
terrible feeling. I do not ask her of what she had been deprived. I
suspect that it wasn’t just toys.
She feels guilty any time she thinks of her own needs. If she wants
to go for a run, she will do something for or with her child instead.
She lets the child “consume” her and resents the child for doing so.
Her fury explodes into yelling. Then she becomes depressed at being
a bad mother who is out of control, which leads to more indulgence
of the child as atonement. She cannot see where and how to break
the cycle.
Anne may feel trapped in her pattern but she is trying to change.
She is in therapy. Her healthy side looks at her sick, compulsive side
and shakes its head in amusement. She says that her “sick side” is in
the grip of an “invisible force.”
What exactly is this invisible force? It is the irrational inuence
she conceals with various rationalizations as she its from one
uncompleted project to the next. The invisible force is what holds
her back and prompts the most peculiar behavior. Take her most
recent attempt at a career. She has been a nightclub singer, a
teacher in the public school, an athlete, all of which she was good at
and abandoned. Then she entered the eld of real estate.
She received her license and survived the initial anxiety of
learning how to sell property. She found that she enjoyed selling,
liked meeting new people, and derived a good deal of satisfaction
from showing people houses they liked. She had absorbed the
narcissistic viewpoint: If they like it, the thing I sell, then I am OK.
All was going well and monetary success was on the horizon when
she started sabotaging herself.
This sabotage involved not getting her customers to their
destinations, an integral part of the business of selling real estate.
Suddenly, she could no longer read a map and began to get lost,
even on roads she knew quite well. Feeling more and more helpless,
she would hand the map over to the client to extricate them. The
idea that she had displayed incompetence made her believe that her
customers would not trust her judgment about the property she was
showing. In her embarrassment she would grow tongue-tied and
forgetful.
Ultimately, she grew to believe that selling was a lost cause. It
was dicult for her to see that it was her unconscious that was
getting her lost. It was her unconscious that caused her to hand over
the map in order to create an image of incompetence. It was the
invisible force that told her to quit rather than to ght it out with
herself.
After a long period of struggle, she became totally exhausted by
the worry and stress of her self-defeating game. She hated going to
the oce and had trouble getting up in the morning. It seemed to
her that there was something physically wrong, and a doctor’s exam
conrmed it. Stress had made her quite anemic. It became necessary
for her to quit the job.
It is not surprising that Anne was married to a man who felt
insecure about his own abilities. In order to feel adequate, he
needed to be the main breadwinner. His wife’s potential for earning
could threaten him. He felt better if his wife merely dabbled.
One might expect the unhealed child of a narcissist, under the
compulsion of the invisible force, to marry someone who would
hold ideas about her nonfunctioning in some ways similar to those
of her parents. Since her husband found Anne’s potential for earning
threatening, she was convinced that he could not accommodate her
movement toward greater independence and feared that she would
lose him if she continued.
Through the childhood experience of her parents’ rejection, Anne
had become well versed in the art of submerging herself. The
expected abandonment by critical parents and a suppressive
husband sat in the back of her mind, creating overwhelming
anxiety. Her thoughts were not clearly organized. She just knew that
everything she held most dear was in danger if she continued to
develop her job skills. It was a relief to fail and get it over with
rather than to continue, all the while expecting the earth to open
and take away the support of her husband and the pleasure of her
family.
Longing for parental love creates the invisible force. Love causes
us to learn what the parent needs from us. It places the parental
gure in our psyche as a governing body, setting standards for
behavior and granting love as a reward for doing what meets with
its approval. The need for love makes the child malleable clay in the
parent’s hands.
When the parent is a narcissist, the course is extraordinarily
dicult. Most of the child’s natural behaviors meet with
disapproval. The child is always trying to please yet never nding
out what is eective and acceptable. The ante is always being
upped. The child becomes confused, angry, and depressed,
alternately trying and giving up, yet remaining in the parent’s
sphere of inuence. He does not learn to please himself.
Let us look at Anne’s upbringing. She got a double dose since both
parents were narcissists. Neither was able to accept her as a person.
Her mother used her as a handmaiden. Anne was required to be
charming and lighthearted as she attempted to meet her mother’s
needs for support and company. Anne’s compulsive gaiety emerges
when she speaks of her various self-destructive activities as if she
were telling an amusing tale. Her laughter indicates that the child
within her has been obeying the immolative laws of the inner parent
telling her to destroy herself. If the inner parent is happy, she is
happy.
At times during Anne’s childhood, her mother would attack her
for no apparent reason. Anne remembers one such occasion in
which her mother ung a hairbrush at her with such force that it
left a raw gash in her head. Anne understood her mother’s rage as
the result of some aw within herself.
Her father also was controlling and physically abusive. Although
he did not admit his attraction and never acted openly sexual
toward her, he had strong incestual leanings. His daughter was very
attractive. Her hourglass gure and huge, laughing eyes had the
boys ocking around. Her father couldn’t stand her interest in other
men. He needed her to remain his exclusive possession.
Anne’s needs did not count. Her parents defended their ef in her
by verbally attacking and demolishing her interest in each young
man who came along. Cowed by their violence and still seeking
their approval, she accepted that the boys were as unworthy as her
parents claimed.
Her father was a self-made man who needed to aunt the brittle
power of money. He was an accountant with many clients in the
underworld. His own tough, lawless attitude showed an
identication with the gangster mentality. The only boyfriend of
whom her father approved was also a shady character. He could
accept someone whose personality was like his own. If Anne had
accepted the gangster, she would be symbolically choosing her
father. If she chose a dierent type, her father would take it as a
personal rejection. Despite his attempted inuence, Anne resisted
and did not marry the gangster suitor.
Her latent healthy side craved a relationship with someone who
would care for her and not merely use her as an embellishment to
his causes. She did meet that someone, a ne young man who
understood her entrapment between two narcissistic parents. He
advised her to leave them, not so much to please him but so that she
could “become a person.”
The two young people shared deep feelings. Anne did not know
what to think of her experience. After a lifetime of manipulation,
she was confused by honest dealing. Her father probably understood
better than she the importance of their union. He didn’t like it. One
day, he called her over and told her to get rid of the young man
saying, “That one is evil!”
Who could be more evil than one who threatened his hegemony
over his daughter? He reinforced his comments with a hard slap in
the face, humiliating Anne as he had always done. Humiliation leads
to the selessness of surrender. Confused and numb, she said
farewell to her young man. She had to believe that her father was
right.
As Anne spoke to me of this time in her life, I could sense her love
for the young man. He was the one she had wanted to marry. She
loved him still. He had given her the strength that helped carry her
out of her crushing parental home. He had cared about her.
Anne spoke to me out of emotional need, as a former member of a
shared psychotherapy group in which we listened to one another’s
problems and oered our solutions. She asked me the question that
haunts children of narcissists: “Did they want to hurt me? Did they
want to ruin my life?” And in this instance, “Why did they reject
every man who ever cared for me?” The narcissistic parent does not
want to hurt his child. He does not even see that there is a child to
destroy since he lives his life by looking in the mirror. He needs to
destroy any “obstacle” in his path, any situation that threatens his
security. This includes the developing autonomy that helps his child
to grow away from him. The child is felt to be a part of himself. If
the child separates, he will be hurt and possibly destroyed. So he
holds on as long as possible by extinguishing the spark of
separateness.
The narcissist attacks separateness in everyone with whom he
must have a relationship. Either they t into his ego-supporting
mold or they are extruded from his life. Narcissistic rage and
aggression are based on fear. His entitlement to absolute control
over others must go unchallenged. The child’s natural growth sets
o the parental alarm signals. The child is blamed for his emerging
individuality as if it were a crime. He is made to feel that there is
something wrong with such development.
Anne’s father frequently called her a “nothing,” especially when
he saw that she did not exist exclusively for him. One time, she had
injured a tendon while dancing at a party. Her father paid her a
condolence call in a rage, since her injury was material evidence of
her unfaithfulness. After visiting for a brief period, he yelled, “You
are nothing,” and stormed out. In gist, he was saying, if I can’t have
you, you don’t count.
Anne’s mother also treated her as a nothing. She needed her
children to be valueless, dependent, and helpless so that they would
always be at her beck and call. She also needed them to fade into
the woodwork when she didn’t want to be bothered by them.
One of her grown sons now holds a job but is otherwise totally
under the control of his wife. The other son “faded away” into drug
addiction. The mother is now widowed and well o. She is
unwilling to do much for Anne, who is treated as a traitor, probably
for the crime of moving far away. Her addict son has the run of her
house. He has his own key and permission to use her apartment
whenever she is traveling. Once, he brought a fellow addict and a
puppy that soiled her rugs. He ransacked his old room and other
closets for things that he could sell and left the place a lthy mess.
Anne’s mother complained to her about his activities but let him
keep the key. He is an extension of her royal, pampered, baby self
and is therefore allowed to eat and soil wherever he wants. She is
pleasing herself by indulging her son and does not realize that she is
destroying him in the bargain.
If Anne asks to borrow her mother’s apartment while the mother
is away so that she and her family can enjoy an aordable
California vacation, she is told, “I’ll see,” or “Do you really need it?”
Anne and her family are unimportant. Her request is an
inconvenience. Anne is hurt that her mother shows no interest in
Anne’s daughter. When her mother visits, she does not spend ve
minutes talking to her grandchild. Anne’s raw pain over her
mother’s behavior indicates that she still does not accept her
mother’s limitations. She doesn’t recognize that her mother’s self-
absorption is nonnegotiable. If she were to show interest in her
grandchild, it would only be an act.
As we talk about these things, Anne scratches her head in the age-
old gesture of one trying to understand the incomprehensible. She
cannot grasp that her parents’ destructive treatment has little to do
with her. The trap of obsessive doubt ensnares many children of
narcissists, sometimes for life. They keep trying to understand,
trying to nd the key that will release the as yet unseen parental
love, instead of breaking away and leading their own lives.
Although the overall picture of narcissism can be readily
understood, small details of parental behavior are inexplicable.
There is no rational explanation for what a completely self-centered
person will do. What they themselves say about it later bears no
relation to the original motivation. They often surrender to
overpowering impulses based on distorted, one-sided, and limited
perceptions. The adult child of the narcissist must wean himself of
the compulsive need to understand the ner points of his parent’s
behavior. He must steer himself away from the pool of Narcissus
before he falls in and drowns.
Let us return to Anne and the invisible force. She completed
college and immigrated to Bualo, where she met and married her
rst husband. He was a kind-hearted tyrant who demanded that she
accede to his eccentric lifestyle. People imprisoned by the invisible
force are more comfortable with emotional prison walls than living
in a free environment in which they continue to feel paralyzed.
She continued to live according to the parental edict: “Be
nothing.” She has many ways to be nothing. One is to be unreliable.
She cancels appointments at the last minute. She forgets to show up
and is always late. Such behavior makes the symbolic statement,
“Don’t expect anything of me. I don’t exist.” Her weight went up
and came down, a roller coaster of obesity. Fat is another way of
hiding. A fat body reassures her inner parents that she is a good
little asexual girl not at all interested in sex and boys. During
adolescence she became addicted to diet pills, believing herself too
weak to control herself without them. Pills became her support for
all kinds of social interactions. Her ego sagged as she increasingly
attributed her accomplishments to the power of the pills.
The child of a narcissist is not supposed to see her own power,
which would threaten the inner parent. Recently, Anne had to take
thirty-seven college credits in an extremely short period. She gave
herself no praise for getting through. Credit to the self interferes
with obedience to the law: Be nothing.
She has assimilated some of the narcissistic ideas of her parents,
for example, that only perfection is acceptable. Accordingly, her fear
of criticism keeps her from trying out for the acting career she has
always wanted. Perfectionists are afraid of being seen and judged.
She nds it dicult to lose weight and to exercise although she
loves sports. Narcissism demands that she remain ageless and
perfect. To take care of one’s body is to note the ravages of time and
to resist them as best one can. If Anne remains a “fat baby,” she is
ageless and safe. Time is the worst enemy of narcissists because it is
an even greater force than they are. Even they must defer to time.
The narcissist is too weak to admit to vulnerability.
But Anne is getting there. She remains in therapy and continues to
struggle with the unconscious pressure on her to be passive. The
war is not over yet. There are temporary defeats but no nal
surrender. She tries not to punish herself with depression each time
she falls. She picks herself up with a laugh and starts again, saying a
slow farewell to the internalized narcissistic parents who have
coalesced into her invisible force.
5
SUICIDAL URGES: JOHN
The demon of self-hatred—its appetite is voracious. It overwhelms and consumes me.
Its energy explodes and I am lled with deep rage and desire for annihilation.
—John (written right before he discovered Zen)
Because he loved his father, John fully
internalized his father’s hateful attitude toward him. This created a
powerfully self-hating negative inner parent (negative introject). A
child’s need to believe that his parent loves him, no matter how he
has been treated, caused John to read parental mistreatment as a
kind of love. If it was harsh and hateful love, that is what was
merited by his unworthy self.
John’s father had high academic and athletic expectations but
treated John as a shabby failure who “didn’t have it.” John lived a
life of horrible conict. One part of him resisted his father’s pressure
to conform to wishes that would have obliterated him as a person.
The other part secretly agreed with his father’s condemnation and
deferred to the negative inner parent, attacking himself with a
deadly hatred.
Any time his environment shifted so that his minimal emotional
support and appreciation diminished further, the negative inner
parent would call for suicide. Suicide oered resolution for several
needs and motives. It was an act of spite against those who had
failed to help, mainly his father. It was an indirect plea for help for
one who could not nd the words. In a negative way, suicide was a
request for love from the negative inner parent. If this introject
would have John kill himself, then by following its edicts and
making the attempt, he is trying to please that internalized need
system. As a result the negative inner parent should love him for
acting like a “good boy.”
This is one logic of the unconscious. It shows that suicide is
always a motivated act, but the motives vary except in cases of
severe physical disorder where it is only to end a life of pain.
John sprawls before me on his bed smoking cigarettes and speaking
of the past. We are old friends. I have seen him through many
stages, during which he often clashed with various authority gures
or threw in the towel on his latest endeavor or interest. He would
get fed up, bored, and start to bail himself out despite unmistakable
signs of success. My telling him about the theme of this book sent
him deeper into history. He alluded to his childhood as a source of
black humor. His stories oered a sarcastic depiction of violence
and rejection, but never before had I heard him speak of his suicidal
past nor felt his emotion when speaking of the almost grotesque
mistreatment to which he was subjected.
We are sitting in a room that is dark and austere. Since his wife’s
recent and abrupt departure and the removal of her bric-a-brac,
dolls, exercycle, and TV, it has reverted to the monastic cell it
actually is.
John is a Zen priest living alone atop a Zen meditation center. It is
as if the marriage never happened and perhaps it should not have,
even though the union had several positive elements in its favor,
such as friendship, fun, loyalty, and a shared love for Buddhism. The
missing element was sexual passion, the same lack that quickly
damned his rst marriage.
When choosing a mate, John seems unable to seam the rational
and sexual sides of his nature. Since only one side is represented,
sooner or later the unmet needs of the other begin to build tension
until there is an eruption that blows the whole structure. After the
marriage, which occurred primarily to please his second wife, she
grew fatter and fatter until he was totally turned o and unable to
respond to her sexually. But sex between them had never been very
satisfying to him, and she may have gained weight to protect herself
against the ultimate abandonment she expected from this enigmatic
man. She could blame his rejection on her weight rather than on
some more essential aw. John followed the script and did develop
an attraction to another woman in the Zen community, which came
to his wife’s attention in the most unexpected manner. She ed.
John has more than once thumbed his nose at societal restraints,
including the restraints of conventional monogamy. He walked out
of graduate school halfway to his master’s degree. Once, as a kid,
without asking permission, John, his brother, and his sister, Delores,
ate the cake they found cooling on a shelf in the kitchen. Their
mother had baked it to be served to her social group the following
Sunday. They enjoyed every bite of it. I asked his sister for an
example of John’s antisocietal position and she said that John led a
hand-to-mouth existence, never trying to secure a reasonable and
constant salary. I remember his cooking for a health food restaurant
and coming to work in pants so torn that his buttocks were half
exposed. His sister called this “commonplace hippie” behavior, but I
remember it as causing a minor scene when he came out to speak to
a customer. The seeds of rebellion are planted deep but John does
not recognize them when they ower. He does not see the repetitive
elements in his life pattern.
Childhood was spent in the West. His family on both sides are old
Western stock, sturdy, intelligent, and cantankerous types who came
over on the rst waves of migration from England when the United
States was still “the colonies.” A famous general is in the family
tree. John is proud of his heritage.
In the earliest memory of his father, the man is advancing before
him, a hazy gure whose feet make crunching sounds on the gravel.
John trails behind listening to his father’s footsteps. The resounding
crunches are very pleasing to his ears. They suggest that his dad is
big and substantial. John knows his father only through indirect
epiphenomena, like the trail of a jet in the sky after the plane has
already passed. It is hard to know a person who is disguising his
image and on the run. His father does not speak. John’s own
footsteps on the gravel are inaudible.
His father has always been out of reach. He doesn’t speak to any
of his three children, two boys and a girl. John is the youngest.
Delores, the oldest, is away at prep school. John is starved for
knowledge of his father. He sneaks into his bedroom and opens
bureau drawers to smell the familiar odor of his clothing. He tries
on his father’s shoes and fantasizes about his father’s life.
He has nicknamed his father the Sphinx, not for wisdom but for
silence. John’s own self-image is limited by a shortage of paternal
male qualities to emulate. He knows that his father is a minister
with a distaste for his work. His father’s mother pushed him into the
ministry so that he could replicate the image of her adored father.
Needing one’s children to fulll personal expectations regardless of
their own interests suggests that she was narcissistic. Her other son
also became a minister but was better suited to the profession.
John’s father suered from a stammer as a result of his mother’s
shifting him from left- to right-handedness when he was young.
Although making righties out of lefties was not uncommon at that
time, child “improvement” is the hallmark of the narcissistic parent.
His stammer was suppressed by a special training program but
would put in an appearance under stress. This did not make pulpit
work any easier.
Since ying was his love, Father moved his family to a new
ministry on several occasions to get closer to a ying eld. He also
did not hit it o with his congregation. When John was about ten,
his father left the ministry for ying. Now he no longer had to fake
his role as leader of the ock, to give stock sermons while
surreptitiously glancing at his watch to make sure that he got to the
golf links on time.
He loved to teach ying, to be around it and to do it. After he left
the ministry, he became even less available to his family because he
was always down at the eld. Occasionally he took John along.
John says wistfully, “I loved ying and wanted to be a pilot.” He
needed to have something to share with his father.
John remembers an early drawing he made of his home with a
green lawn in front, his bike leaning up against the house, and a
small plane circling overhead. He says, “That was Dad, up in the
sky.” He was perhaps eight or nine when his father would take him
to the airport and park him in a “crashed out, ancient plane” on the
edge of the eld. His father would tell him, “Try and start it up,”
and leave to go up into the sky with other people whom John
assumed were his students. John says, “He didn’t want any kids
around.” John received none of the special recognition, attention, or
training that would usually be accorded to the instructor’s son. He
would play for a while in the crashed plane and then just hang out,
waiting for his dad, yearning to be up with that glamorous gure.
He spent an inordinate amount of time alone. He says, “I was used
to it. I could amuse myself.”
While his father was still living at home, he obviously didn’t enjoy
the company of his children. He was always clearing them out of
any room he was in and sent them to bed as early as possible. Boys
were “too noisy.” They weren’t “peaceful.”
John and his older brother, Timothy, were not at all friendly with
one another and fought all the time. John says that “Timothy was
full of anger and he … worked me over good.” Fighting probably
was an outlet for their frustration as well as having the unconscious
objective of forcing their father to intervene and pay them some
attention. Their father would pull on his belt as if to say, “OK, boys,
now you’re gonna get it.” It wasn’t much but it was better than
nothing.
John remembers only a single moment of tenderness with his
father. Signicantly, it occurred after he was beaten. He had been
smoking under the house when spotted by a plumber, who turned
him in to his parents. John had been smoking cigarettes stolen from
his parents for years. It was a point of pride that he enjoyed inhaling
while his friends were still holding the smoke in their mouths.
When John’s father heard of his smoking, a habit that he of
course shared, the belt came o in earnest. There was no discussion,
no concern for the inconsistency that allowed him to punish his son
for something he himself did. Five or six blows were administered to
John’s posterior. He lay weeping on his bed when he felt his father’s
hand gently rubbing his back, attempting to soothe him. Love, at
last. Did John form some association between abuse and love? He
has certainly lumbered into an inordinate number of mistreating
relationships in his life. His girlfriends, of whom I have known
three, were selsh, self-centered, and demanding; they also were
attractive and distant. I remember one who would not say hello
because she was washing her hair at the kitchen sink right in front
of me; another would not go with John to visit his sister because she
didn’t like the area. For John, love and warfare are related, not
surprising for the son of a bellicose narcissist.
The silence of the Sphinx extended to John’s mother. She had no
inkling that her husband was planning to leave them and had
thrown a surprise birthday party for him just a few days prior to his
departure. Things had not been good between them for a long time.
One day soon after the party, her husband threw a few things,
including his presents, into a bag and departed for good. The only
clue that ten-year-old John had of his father’s approaching ight
was seeing him sitting on the side of his bed with his head in his
hands. John knew better than to inquire about what was bothering
him.
John’s father is a narcissist. He had little interest in his wife and
children. During World War II, although a minister, he vanished into
the RAF, leaving his wife to fend for herself. He was still a minister
at this time but his interest went into ying. His wife was left with
their baby daughter since her husband always did exactly what he
wanted and others had to live with it. Intelligent, talented, and
extraordinarily self-centered, he avoided human contact and
responsibility by escaping into the sky. To people outside the family,
he appeared likable and easy to get along with. He was so dierent
at home with his children that John felt that it must in some way be
his (John’s) fault.
His father left his family and moved to Portland, Oregon, where
in addition to ying, he taught mathematics at a local high school.
He remarried a woman who had kids of her own. In his teens, John
joined them for a while and found his father taking o as usual
because he had people he wanted to be with and they were not his
family. His wife shed bitter tears. Mostly his father’s friends were
fans of ying, mathematics whizzes, and athletes. John attended
school knowing that his father wanted him to be a letter man and a
big man on campus. To be accepted it was necessary that he be
good at scholastics and sports but he was good at neither. For a
while, he played a halfhearted game of football, but he “couldn’t
stand banging up against people.” With his large and muscular
frame, one can easily imagine him as a star athlete, but obviously he
was unwilling to conform to his father’s conditions. He would not
sell out. Instead, he sank steadily and progressively into the mire of
rebellious failure. Perhaps failure was closer to the role that his
father unconsciously envisioned for him.
He watched with rage and despair when his father took a young
student under his wing, treating him as a friend. The boy was what
John was supposed to be and in his place. As an ultimate sign of
buddyship, his father and the boy played golf together. John could
not mobilize himself to work at sports or academics. He was unable
to concentrate or study and classes were intolerably boring. He was
turned o, inattentive, and cutting up. He did very poorly.
His feelings of resentment toward his father found their way into
the classroom, into problems with authority. Reports of his poor
conduct could not help but reach his father’s ears. Perhaps John
unconsciously wished to humiliate him. John felt little sense of
belonging since, due to his father’s changes of living place, he had
attended several schools. Overall, what sent John into a tailspin was
the lack of relationship with a father who knew and cared for him.
Although terrible report cards reected only his rebelliousness
and depression, John irrationally believed that he had been
correctly assessed. He joined the teachers in their negative view and
felt horrible about himself. The report cards reinforced what he had
already discerned from his father’s treatment, that he wasn’t worth
bothering about.
John remembers the time he broke the code of his father’s
nonverbal gestures and really “knew” his father’s opinion of him. He
had just uttered a dirty word when his father entered the room and
overheard him. His father’s look conveyed the message, “You’re
nothing but shit.” The shoulders lifted in disgust gave the message,
“I’m nished with you. I give up.” John was later to hear these
words spoken to his face. He internalized his father’s evaluation and
believed it true. Every child does this. He took all the blame for how
he was treated.
He believed himself utterly stupid. His brother’s grades were
excellent while his were abysmal. His father’s wife’s kids also got
high grades. As an adult, John’s mother told him that his IQ had
tested exceptionally high, way above the A-student stepsiblings with
whom he was to live. But his younger years were lived as an angry
dunce. At one time, he and his brother cut school eleven days in a
row. Three points per day were taken from each of John’s grades,
leading to a long string of F’s, while Timothy’s grades were left
untouched. This was one more proof that he was inherently marked
and doomed.
When John was about thirteen and still living with his mother,
she made another unfortunate choice in the man she remarried.
John describes Ralph, her husband, as “brilliant but driven,” one
who could be the “sweetest man on earth,” or explode in rage.
Once, he threatened John’s mother with a knife and “threw her
good stu into the woods.” When the couple fought, his brother,
Timothy, and he would huddle outside their bedroom door with a
baseball bat ready to save her life. One night their mother slept in
the woods to hide from Ralph. The man was extremely threatening.
Yet John has no conscious anger at the destructive male gures
his mother introduced into his life, nor is he angry at her for doing
so. He speaks understandingly of Ralph’s “problem,” the fact that he
had a high-pressure job and took his tension out on the family. I
asked John if Ralph drank. After a pause, he answered yes. The role
of alcoholism as a partial explanation for Ralph’s conduct has been
underplayed. John has been inculcated into the family pattern of
denying the seriousness of drinking in its men. No foreigner to drugs
himself, he has turned to chemical solutions as a means of escaping
from psychological pain when no human succor was available.
John never blamed his mother for becoming involved with men
who could not adequately parent her children and whose problems
made her inaccessible to them as well. It was as natural for him to
be without a father’s love as it may have been natural for his mother
to be without a reliable and intimate husband. Her own father had
been hopelessly narcissistic so she was used to being ignored and
abused. If one were to compare Ralph’s mistreatment with the
sporadic availability and total self-involvement of John’s father,
Ralph was an improvement.
Even before high school, John was already disconsolate. His
mother was too busy keeping her own head above water to notice
his psychological condition and he had learned not to speak about
such feelings. Communication about despair was avoided by the
entire family. They tended toward a manic hilarity, partying,
drinking, the young ones smoking dope, all running from their
troubles. A positive aspect of his mother’s personality was that she
was not a worrier. She gave John the gift of independence, was
loving and trustful and not overprotective. She supported the
development of his adventurous spirit. At the age of seven, he would
bicycle ten miles from home. She gave him freedom but would not
share his burden of pain. He was very much alone.
At around twelve, he was beginning to get into his “suicide head.”
His thoughts were lled with obsessive self-loathing. There was
little to hold on to and nothing to hold him back. He was out of
contact with the family who could have cared and, as usual, failing
at school. He desperately craved attention but could not request it in
words. He used a symbolic gesture to signal for help.
His rst suicide attempt was kept secret. He tried to drink Clorox
but could not get it down. Immediately after abandoning this
method, he sawed away on his arm with a blunt knife but survived.
No one ever learned of this practice run. The idea of suicide became
an imaginary door out of his misery. It was a bitter comfort, always
open for his departure. Suicide expressed the hatred of one part of
himself for the other. The part that hated had identied with his
scornful father. It found the rest of him unworthy and declared that
if someone is not worth loving, he is not worth keeping alive. The
negative inner parent enjoyed the idea of immolating the
inadequate child within. Psychologically, the walls were closing in.
In the seventh grade, unruly behavior and irreconcilable conict
with Ralph landed John in the formalized hell of military school.
The only relief was that he could smoke openly. There was much
physical abuse. Ocers passing by would gratuitously smack
students on the head, school rings turned inward to leave a painful
goose egg. Students were punished by having to lean against a wall
supported by their thumbs until they collapsed. They had to do
innumerable knee bends. Bigger boys attacked the small and all
ganged up on John because he was an unrepentant free thinker.
Military school was an exacerbation of the abuse he was used to at
home.
Again there was no one to turn to, no one who could understand.
His father had disposed of him and was disinterested. His mother
was overwhelmed by her problems with Ralph. In military school,
the idea of suicide became a xation whose impulse was
periodically dispelled by the violent treatment he received from
others. They did the punishing for him.
After a year in military school, he returned to his mother’s home.
He was there for half a year when he went joyriding with a friend,
another deant and lonely boy. The only problem was that his
friend had stolen the car they were riding in. They were caught and
arrested. John was given the option of a reformatory or going to live
with his nineteen-year-old sister in Los Angeles. He chose the latter.
At least it got him away from Ralph.
His sister was trying to make it as an actress and dancer.
Modeling provided subsistence. She received no help from either
parent. They had cut her o for having refused college. She and her
mother paid John’s tuition at a private school. Their father made no
contribution to his children’s upkeep.
If John had been behind in country schools, city private schools
chosen by his sister were so much more advanced that he felt
hopelessly outclassed. The kids already had years of a foreign
language and he had none, and so on. He felt unable to live up to
his teachers’ or his sister’s expectations. Still unable to concentrate
and apply himself, he got another lousy report card. He still gave
undue respect to grades. Once more, he had been branded inferior.
At fourteen, he made his second attempt at suicide by throwing
himself in front of a moving vehicle. He escaped injury but his sister
realized that he had more serious problems than she was able to
cope with. Still, no one asked him what was wrong. His sister also
had been raised in her family’s conspiracy of silence and was unable
to relate to the intensity of his self-hatred. She had the family rules
down pat: Act upbeat, strive hard, and look good for the world to
see; do not complain or make demands. She could no more relate to
John’s suering than she could recognize her own pain. John had
again been forced to take the nonverbal route. The suicide attempt
was a symbolic gesture announcing, “Hey, someone, help me. I’m
desperate and going under.”
He didn’t get much help. His father remained distant and breezy
on the phone. He showed no desire to reach out to his son and
John’s ego was too fragile to allow him to make a direct request. He
couldn’t have taken further refusal and so veered o the topic. His
mother was too busy with Ralph; his sister had her career. He was
summarily shipped o to an aunt in Portland.
It was painful to live with his aunt and uncle while his father
lived nearby with the “good kids.” His father had always favored
other people’s children over his own. John was apprised of the fact
that his father’s stepchildren were straight-? students in the high
school where their mother was a teacher. Any comparison between
John and the stepchildren put him in an unfavorable light. He
continued to believe that they were receiving something from his
father that he was not, loved because they got good grades. This was
a self-destructive fantasy. His father was no more available to this
family than he had been to John’s own. He was still totally self-
absorbed and hanging out at the airport. That’s who he was and
couldn’t be otherwise.
In school, fteen-year-old John continued to act out his despised
self-image, unconsciously hoping that someone would see through
it. He was still the rebellious “bad boy,” the “tough guy” who was
incapable of learning and who played hookey. He received yet
another disastrous report card.
Report cards were always the event that tipped the balance of his
relationship with himself, sending his self-esteem into a downward
slide. John needed the scholastic world to evaluate him favorably
and it failed to do so. His ego was shredding with no one to know it.
He resolved to die, bought several bottles of over-the-counter
sleeping pills, and went out to the beach of a nearby lake. He waded
in to a depth where he could reach down and bring the water up to
his mouth. Cupping the water in his hands, he took all the pills.
His mouth was dry. He felt nauseated. He vomited, then began
hallucinating, hearing voices. Time passed. His aunt and uncle came
searching and found him by the lake. It hurt him that it was they
and not his father who had been looking. When they saw his
disordered state, they assumed that he was drunk and John did not
inform them otherwise. It was a kind of crazy pride that kept him
from explaining, from asking them for help. He returned home,
where his father was waiting, not the least bit interested in nding
out what had motivated his son. The child was condemned—again.
The rst words out of his father’s mouth were: “Pack your bags,
boy. I’m washing my hands of you.” According to his father, he was
an incorrigible waste to be dumped.
The next day, or perhaps it was that very night, he is not sure,
John was on a train back to his mother. The thing that troubled him
was the enforced separation from his girlfriend. He didn’t even
realize how much it was going to hurt him to be without her.
Back with his mother, it was just the two of them. Ralph, her
second husband, was gone. She was divorced and living in a
dierent rented apartment, on the road ve days a week working in
sales. With this schedule she left John alone and he was increasingly
morose. He sat on the couch, which was his bed, shades drawn to
make it as dark as his mood. He played songs on the guitar and
wrote many cards and letters to his girlfriend. He wrote the poetry
of desperation. A few alienated friends joined him in making music,
singing mostly sad songs. He ached for the love of his girlfriend, for
someone to touch him in his solitude. His loneliness became
intolerable. Something had to give to break the hideous tension. He
saw no other way but to kill himself. This time the attempt was very
serious.
He got hold of the barbiturates that his mother kept for
headaches. He left himself an out in that the attempt was staged at
school, where there was a possibility of rescue. He took the pills, fell
unconscious, and was taken to the hospital where his stomach was
pumped. Then he was placed on a psychiatric ward.
Although most of the people there were far sicker than he, he
liked it. There was no social facade to maintain. Everyone was
straightforwardly desperate. They were real. He made friends with
another suicidal boy and entered into the turning point of his life.
For the rst time, he was able to communicate with honesty and
depth. John had never known that it was possible to emerge from
the prison of psychological isolation and be understood. He acquired
a new perspective.
John’s friend was determined to die. He got hold of a razor and
sneaked onto the elevator, away from surveillance. He cut his wrists
between oors. John says, “They put him further back.” He never
saw his friend again. Even so, his healing had begun.
His father ew in for the weekend to visit him in the hospital
exactly once. It was an obligatory gesture. John was not comforted
by his cold demeanor.
Once out, his mother sent him to a “fty-dollar psychiatrist” who
was short on sympathy. He told John that he was “bullshitting”
when he spoke of his ghts with his brother. John saw in the
psychiatrist yet another rejecting male and quit therapy for good.
He never had much luck with father gures.
He was out of school for the rest of the year, accompanying his
mother on her selling rounds. In his nal year he played hookey a
lot, as usual. The only exception was Miss Nunnamaker’s class.
He showed up drunk in her class and instead of sending him to
the dean, she told him, “Go to the lavatory and get yourself cleaned
up.” He felt that she was genuinely concerned about him, not just
with the rules. He was inspired to work in her class, history, a
subject which he did not really enjoy. He got an A. It was his gift to
her. He had responded to a small degree of kindness. Perhaps he
was ready to believe that someone might nd him worthwhile. He
knew that he had made his last suicide attempt although he was
“still capable of the notion.”
He went to college and did extremely well. His father was “too
busy” to attend graduation. He went to graduate school in English
but quit before completing his master’s thesis. Pulling in the reins at
the last minute became a pattern. He allowed himself to
demonstrate ability but not to complete the course. On one level,
success might mean trying to please his rejecting father. On another,
it might mean replacing him. He was trapped in a limbo of
indecision about what to do with his life.
He oundered through many jobs. The unconscious taint of his
father’s appraisal, that he was a “hopeless fuck-up,” probably
followed him and had its inuence. At eighteen, he had a rst
marriage that failed after producing in its second year a son who
was called Little John. The marriage split up in its fourth year and
his son was left with his mother, who soon remarried. John kept in
touch with his boy, even more as time went on. At the time of his
birth, he may not have felt capable of full-time fathering. His own
experience of fathers had never been anything but destructive. He
may have feared the kind of father he would be with such models
and ed from too intensive and damaging a contact.
With his discovery of Zen, John made his rst real commitment. It
is suggestive that he characterized his father as “unknowable in
words.” A Zen meditator looks beyond words to an ineable reality
within the quiet void of mind. John says, “The authority of Zen is in
the silence.” Perhaps he was trying to understand his father, the
Sphinx, by looking into silence. Perhaps he was trying to be like
him, the former minister.
His father has played a striking role in John’s life. John knows so
much about him and yet has not yet been able to create a unied
picture. He keeps the bad father in one compartment of his mind
and the good father in another. He says that his father is “incapable
of making enemies,” and forgets the years of rage when his mother
supported a family of three children without assistance. He calls his
father a “gentle man … with sweetness in his character,” and
suppresses all the memories of being cruelly rejected, overlooked,
and scorned. By keeping away the negative images, he can continue
to idealize a man who could be generous with his friends when full
of the bonhomie of drink or without it.
John visited his eighty-year-old father in the hospital where he
awaited a dangerous operation for an aneurysm. John was in his
early forties and uncomfortable to nd his strong and silent father
terried. His father told him, “Be careful with Little John. Otherwise
you’ll lose him.” In these words, John believes he heard an apology
for all the years of rejection. But words are not enough, especially
where a narcissist is concerned. The words of a narcissist can mean
very little.
And so it is with his father. The old man uses easy, Western
endearments, calls John Honey, tells him, “I love you,” giving a
twenty-dollar bill as a Christmas present to a son who can really use
a hand. Endearments had been reserved for his girlfriends, never for
his kids. As an old man, he rst used aectionate terms but still
refused to oer nancial help and spent only limited time with his
children. This father was unwilling to help his daughter set up her
own business, even to cosign a loan. His claim of insolvency was an
obvious lie. He gives his money freely to cronies and buys expensive
presents for women he wishes to impress. His children still do not
count. Let them struggle. Let them sink. It is not his problem.
John needs to see his father as he is. Parental idealization
misconstrues reality and is destructive to his development. If his
father was “not capable of hurting a soul,” then John’s wounds are
his own fault. He must see that his father was incapable of love,
rather than see himself as a born loser. He can throw o the role of
the decient child who is not worth saving and come into his own
power. It was not his fault that the paternal well was dry. It is time
he learned that he is worthy of love.
There is hope for John if he knows that he chooses to limit
himself. He has to express his anger in ways that are not self-
destructive, to learn that he can love without losing his soul and can
be loved in a dierent way.
6
ATTRACTION TO NARCISSISTIC MATES BY CHILDREN OF
NARCISSISTS: DELORES
This is the story of how our early
experience with a narcissistic parent, particularly one of the
opposite sex, can lead us to choose similar types to love. How else
can we account for our choice of suering? Despite our complaining
we repeat the problem.
We loved our narcissistic parent although we may only remember
pain. Adults often do not stay in touch with their childish longings
and satisfactions but develop an association between the pain and
love once felt. If our parent forgot his appointments and holidays
with us, we choose a forgetful lover. If the parent did not help out at
home, we end up with the household chores. Some of the
similarities between then and now may be exact. Some will follow a
general pattern. Like a lover who does not earn sucient salary at a
job dierent from the one held by a parent who was a poor
provider. Or a lover who does not touch us with aection but is
sexual in the same way we felt our parent to be.
We look at our past with hatred and do not see its resemblance to
the present. It isn’t pretty or fun to know that we love a person
because he mistreats us in specic ways. It is painful to realize that
we are with a narcissist to get the love that we never received from
our narcissistic parent. We do not want this man for himself but
need his loving to prove our parent’s love. We have chosen a life
without easy pleasure when better is available. If only the past
would loosen its hold on us.
Delores is my oldest and dearest friend. While we lived in San
Francisco, we had known each other through many years and
extended helping hands over life’s rough terrain. Because our fathers
were supremely narcissistic, we have trodden similar psychological
mine elds and emerged with related battle scars. We oer each
other the understanding that we never found in our families.
I asked Delores to participate in this book as an example of a
“woman who loves too much” and she agreed. Almost immediately,
we ran into a characteristic snag since she barely had a moment for
a formal interview. We could talk only between spurts of activity
when she was in the throes of exhaustion. Delores is a whirling
dervish, dancing in a high wind. Her phone is forever ringing; she
listens to other people’s problems, giving instructions to the workers
of her booming interior design business. As the child of a narcissist,
she has strong doubt but stronger determination. Her bravado
borders on arrogance. A talented person who likes to direct projects,
she is also the child of an unreliable narcissist and allows other
people to cheat her.
She is ever planning her next party, event, or dinner, imagining
and inventing, purchasing or considering purchasing. A business in
home design grew out of her life since she is always reaching out for
new experiences and drawing people to her. Once she talked me
into buying a water bed, with the consequence that I slept on the
oor for years until I found a buyer.
Delores told me a recent dream that showed her fear. She is
climbing a mountain, going higher and higher until she reaches its
peak. Before her is a drop o to emptiness. Filled with anxiety, she
must go down or fall o.
In this dream, Delores saw fear that her business will fail, that she
will run out of ideas and be cheated of success. My interpretation of
the same dream had a dierent slant. The idea that achieving great
heights can be dangerous may relate to the grandiosity it stimulates.
Narcissism lurks within the psyche of every child of a narcissist
since we had such a parent to identify with. Rise too high and you
can become narcissistic. Getting out of touch with people is like a
death.
Delores is ve years older than her brother John, of the chapter
on suicide. They have the same father, cold, haughty, self-centered,
interested in ying his plane and getting away from his family.
Delores spent her rst ve years without him because he was ying
in England for the RAF. He had left his family for a voluntary
enlistment right after Delores was born, which shows how little he
cared for his wife and child.
During his time away, Delores was raised by a somewhat
narcissistic mother who focused on appearance, permed and
bleached the baby’s hair, and put her on interminable diets. Delores
grew up with a fantasy about what her father would be like, kind,
sweet, and physical, like her uncles who cuddled her cousins on
their laps. But when he returned from the war, it was dierent.
He was cold and oered no physical contact, attempting to rein
her in and to remove the privileges she had had with her mother.
He responded to her assertiveness with dislike. In her teens, she and
her father argued when she neglected to call him sir, for which he
slapped her in the face. In some peculiar way, a slap from this
oblivious man meant he cared for her. He gave the same aggressive
response followed by a token of aection to her brother John. At the
close of her father’s living with his family, he left them at,
providing little subsequent contact and no nancial support.
By the time of his departure, Delores was in her midteens, a
scornful person who didn’t want him to be around. Cynicism
covered the memory of her early years of pain, when her hopeful
gaze was met by his coldness. She secretly blamed herself for his
response, thinking she wasn’t lovable, nice, acceptable, or pretty
enough to please him. His slap was one of the strongest responses he
had given her. Although she resented it, one must infer from her
subsequent choice of men that she unconsciously marked it as
evidence of his love. In this way, abuse became part of her model of
being loved by narcissistic and abusive men.
Tortured relationships with men formed the centerpiece of our
lives and the frequent subject of conversation. Delores and I would
talk about our boyfriends’ behavior and try to help each other out.
Men are the emotional center for many women, but not always
because they are upsetting. Men usually are valued because they
oer a woman security and pleasure, friendship, intimacy, the
support of a helping hand.
But not ours. They were very dicult to get along with. We
couldn’t get close to them and be nicely treated. We focused on
them in an obsessive, addictive fashion and kept trying. The worse it
got, the harder it was for us to let go—up to a point. I chose men
who were intelligent, self-centered, and unwilling to make a
commitment. Delores chose men who were intelligent, dependent,
and very abusive.
The negative traits that attracted us were no accident, although
we were unaware of our pattern. Each fell for her “ideal” man and
was blinded by love. Suering took a while to penetrate.
Unavailable and ungiving intellectual workaholics were like my
father. Abusive, intelligent, and demanding men who gave nothing
and took everything were like her father. Our unconscious goal was
to turn these men into loving, giving, and available partners. It was
like trying to carve Mt. Rushmore with a toothpick.
We stood by each other through incredible pairings and did not
shame the other for it. Our conversations were funny as we
caricatured the latest mishap and absurdity to which we clung.
Laughter diminished the importance of the latest men who were
sandpapering our souls. We never felt secure with the guys who
turned us on and stimulated a painful yearning. Eventually, we got
rid of our current disasters but never spoke of the inevitable ones to
come.
My men would usually vanish on their own as soon as I pressured
them to get close and make a commitment. Delores’s men would
immediately move in and weather her attempts to get them to
change their abusive patterns until she gave up and asked them to
leave. Her asking was soft and tenuous. They responded with anger,
smoked a joint, and generally ignored her.
With Delores, the repetitious element of abuse took many forms.
Men promised her the world and secretly expected it from her.
Delores had her way of promising back. Her suering had a kind of
sweetness and excitement. You could hear it in her voice when she
spoke to her hypersensitive mates, high and soft, as if singing a
lullaby to a baby. She chose her words carefully so as not to set o
their nitroglycerine tempers.
Her father also had an explosive personality, demanding attention
and consideration and giving none back. As an old man, he visited
without telling his kids that he was coming. Summoned to his side,
they had to procure his favorite cigars, feed him on schedule, and
drive him to his motel on command regardless of what was going
on.
Some of Delores’s men have included the following (I am omitting
others no less dicult): a Coca-Cola addict, hopped up on caeine
and sugar and constantly generating ghts. Ten minutes after I met
him, we had an angry repartee about the eect of liver on your
health! He had escaped from a career in science to a backwoods
hermitage without running water where he made oddly shaped
candles that reminded me of the works of Charles Addams. He met
Delores in a co-op where he sold candles and she sold the paintings
she was doing at the time. Delores put up with his tantrums and
tried to make him stop his Coca-Cola. He proved unregenerate.
I rst met Delores with her husband, Jay, a charming and
extremely irresponsible man who abused her with his “meditative”
lack of interest in the practicalities of life. Irresponsibility had been
a central trait of Delores’s narcissistic father, who was unavailable
when he was needed and later refused to support his family.
Delores’s husband was an otherworldly baby who held on to her for
dear life. She could not entrust him with the smallest task. He lifted
his huge eyes to the heavens when asked to contend with a task in
“gross reality” and usually would mismanage it. He was a follower
of Eastern religion and left the concerns of the world to God, guru,
and wife, in that order.
Jay was paid a subsistence income for barely working in the rm
of his wealthy, disapproving, and rejecting father. Jay was used to
being bailed out by his mother, for whom Delores served as a
substitute. Despite talent and artistic pretensions he only dabbled at
drawing and photography. His work had an otherworldly, vanishing
perspective and was presented to visitors to entertain them and gain
self-esteem from their appreciation. He had no interest in
developing his abilities to generate income.
After Delores had their baby, she had two children to take care of,
Jay and her son. Her dreamer husband would leave the house in
unmatched socks and shoes tied with string. A religious “fool” is
above such things as appearances. Sent to buy milk for his child, he
would return hours later in an elevated state having purchased a
rare and holy book. The milk had been forgotten and the book was
expensive. Delores did not dare let him take their son shopping for
fear that he would forget and leave him in the supermarket.
The only material thing that concerned him was that Delores
should not be long out of his sight. He became hysterical when she
came home later than expected, saying that he feared her being
mugged. Probably he was afraid that she would meet another man
and leave him. Which she did.
He was one of a long line of baby men who, with Delores’s
encouragement, glued themselves on. Glueyness kept them from
walking out as her father once had done. She could control these
men by “giving” to them as she had done with father and brother.
A few boyfriends after her marriage came a spate with a
revolutionist carpenter who liked his beer and was charming and
unreachable. As long as she catered to him, went dancing, and
smoked grass, everything between them was ne. On her birthday,
he used magic marker to write “Al loves Delores,” in huge black
letters on the school wall opposite their apartment. But did he? His
revolutionary feelings were expressed by ripping o society. It was
but a short jump to abusing the woman with whom he lived.
Why is Delores attracted to opportunism and lawlessness in men?
Many of her men have followed this pattern, leading quasi-
predatory lives outside the mainstream and nding their easiest
victim in her. She was drawn by their ability to survive in
unconventional ways. So much oppressed was she by the numerous
strictures of her mother and father that their deance seemed to
spell freedom. She didn’t see it as inevitable that they would also
take advantage of her. Like other women who “love too much,” her
addiction to abuse is unknown to her. Where better to nd abuse
than from an angry rebel who is looking for reparations?
There were various kinds of violence in her “love” relationships. A
spoken word can be as hurtful as a blow. Until I interviewed her for
this book, Delores had never spoken to me about her physical
mistreatment, since the victim may consider such behavior to be a
humiliating thing. She may also secretly think that she deserves
abuse, which is why it and the relationship continue. We only
discussed verbal violence except for the one “accident” when she
and her boyfriend were working on their apartment and his hammer
“somehow” ew through the air to hit her in the head. She said that
it felt as if there was something peculiar about this but didn’t dwell
upon it.
She didn’t make a connection between the present and her past
with a father who had been violent as well. In speaking of her love
misadventures, she is like the woman who tells a friend, “I don’t
think my husband loves me anymore.” “Why?” asks the friend.
“Because he hasn’t hit me in a month.”
I asked her more about violence and she spoke of cursing and
yelling, pinches, shoves, and slaps. Her current man once pushed
her to the oor and threatened her with a chair leg; another time,
he attempted to strangle her for asking him to contribute more to
household upkeep. Angry, terried, disgusted, she nevertheless
eventually went back to him. In his savage passion she saw a sign of
need and love. She felt regret when battered by his cry—”Don’t
abandon me.” Claiming to be depressed by him, she nds a million
reasons for remaining and does not see how his mistreatment ts
into her childhood experience of what she learned to call “loving.”
Delores has always placated men, starting with an angry
narcissistic father who ignored her individuality. He did not
appreciate her physical beauty or ability to dance and disregarded
her need for aection and attention. Romantic partners followed
suit, transgressing against the principles which she does little to
make clear. Delores’s principles would include a fair exchange of
services, in which one party is not to assume the nancial burden of
the other. It would include being mutually pleasant and responsive.
She would have her men be reliable and true to their word, but in
this respect she is like her narcissistic father and does not present a
reliable and verbally trustworthy image of herself to them. Their
unreliability is complained about and accepted. Hers is excused and
overlooked. Delores does not set limits and is terried of using the
word no. Not only do her boyfriends take advantage, but also her
son, who is dependent and undeveloped. Boyfriends, son, friends all
try to parasitize her since her behavior teaches them to take from
her without constraint and to ignore her needs.
Her mother’s having to placate her father and the way he treated
his daughter taught Delores that a woman’s role is to make the man
comfortable by acceding to his every wish. I have heard Delores
complain in a weak, ineectual voice that seems to say, “Ignore me,
I don’t mean it.” To me, she speaks of confusion, anger, and pain,
but her man does not hear much about it until her positive feelings
for him have been completely exhausted.
Her series of boyfriends included many surly ripos, drug users,
name callers—demanding, insensitive men. They were a series of
emotional hair shirts of whom Delores said, “I loved them all but I
didn’t like any one of them.” It shocked her to speak this thought
aloud although she claimed to have always known it. Often, we do
not pay attention to our thoughts until something brings them
center stage. Apropos of this, our talking together did not set o
vast insights since so much is invested in remaining the same.
Addiction to our painful quest keeps many children of narcissists
locked in unhappy relationships. I would say that Delores’s primary
insight from our discussions was learning that she encouraged
people to take advantage of her. In our last phone call, she said she
was taking a weekend course on how to make demands.
In our discussions, there were many questions and denials, such
as, “How can I be choosing a man to love me who resembles my
father when my father loved me so little?” Delores doesn’t see how a
healthy supportive love aair and what she actually seeks are
dierent. Cutting through our defenses and fantasies takes more
than logic. If we cannot correctly see ourselves, we need to submit
ourselves to the insights of someone whose vision is more
trustworthy. We must break eggs to make an omelette and we must
give up the ancient pleasures of courting the narcissistic parent if we
want to learn to live a dierent way, enjoying a person who sees
and accepts us as we are. When Delores read the nal chapter in this
book, she resolved to re the dependent and unreliable workers in
her shop and to nd people who would do the job.
Although liking a person is usually based in part on a realistic
appraisal of how she or he treats us or on objective characteristics
that attract us, loving also comes from a deeper and sometimes
irrational place. The experiences of childhood can cause us to love
someone who doesn’t treat us well at all.
Delores’s childhood was broken up into three sections: the time
before her father came home from the war, the time he was home
again, and the time after he had left for good. Life with a narcissistic
mother also aected her later relationships with narcissistic men.
Her rst ve years were spent with a mother who gave dancing
lessons to support the two of them. Mother was a feisty woman who
encouraged Delores to be creative and free-spirited. She was not the
kind to dwell on unhappiness or unpleasantness but would activate
herself in a kind of manic defense against depression.
Mother’s narcissistic traits kept her from accepting Delores for
herself. Mother’s love was conditional, in the narcissistic fashion.
Delores had to meet her need for social status since Mother believed
that this would lead to happiness.
She had been a model once and Delores had to be equally popular
and beautiful. Mother’s scrutiny sensitized Delores to the least of her
physical imperfections, like having a “pigeon” breast (protruding
breastbone). Delores was encouraged to think about ways to hide
her aws and enhance her good points with makeup, dress,
manners, and charm. Before going on a date, she had to pass muster
with her mother. The only acceptable words, to be heard with relief,
were, “You look beautiful.” Such training led to a career in interior
design—Delores could put people into fantastic settings that
changed the way they saw themselves.
In Delores’s mother we see the previous generation repeating the
choice of a narcissistic mate due to having had a narcissistic parent
of the opposite sex. Delores’s mother was the daughter of a
narcissistic father, an arrogant man who despised everyone as
beneath him. He nicknamed his wife Nummy, short for numbskull.
His daughters obediently called their mother Nummy, as if unaware
of what the name signied. By denigrating her, they courted Dad’s
approval and sullied the image of women. Many children of
narcissists come out hating themselves and their sex.
Delores’s mother told a story about her own father. It was the
height of the Depression and he was preparing a tire for repair by
soaking the inner tube in a tub on the dining room table. His
daughter was expecting a suitor and asked him to remove the tub so
she could use the room to entertain him. Father atly refused. No
one else counted.
Daughter grown up, she met her future husband and was
immediately smitten, enchanted by his looks, ne manners, and
excellent profession. He was a minister who knew how to “woo the
ladies.” She claims to have had no inkling of his narcissism but we
all have unconscious radar that tells us the kind of person we are
with. Delores’s mother had found a man like her father, one who
would soak his own psychological tires on her dining room table.
After they were married, he quickly showed his colors. He was
disinterested in her family and separated himself from their doings.
He was not interested in their outings at the beach where her family
had a house, didn’t want to “schmooze” over lengthy dinners, and
didn’t like his work. His charm with the ladies was strictly for
strangers. All he wanted to do was to get family obligations over
with and return to the safety of the ying eld where he gave
lessons. Flying took him away from demands that he give his family
interest and love.
After he returned from the war, two more children were born,
both boys. The family moved several times to new towns to be
nearer the airport. His congregation expected a generosity of spirit
that Delores’s father did not have. His boys were neglected and
growing up angry, having been treated by Dad with disdain and
dislike. Mother got the short end of the parental stick and probably
resented her mothering duties without support and appreciation
from her mate.
Delores says, “I had no use for him and his meaningless rules.”
But when Delores was eleven or twelve, the family took their meals
in miserable anxiety. They would all sit down to eat. Her father
would hastily consume a bit of food, push back his chair, and
mumble, “Gotta go.” It was over and he was o. No talking and
sharing. The family hated feeling abandoned and began to gobble
alongside him so as not to be the ones that he left. Delores still hurls
down her food in a self-generated race to nish quickly.
It was an unhappy family trying to put on a good face. Delores’s
mother liked to play and didn’t want the burden of raising her
children without help. She saw salvation in Delores’s tractability
and increasingly turned to the young girl for help. Delores lacked
condence in her ability to do it but, to get mother’s approval,
replaced her at baby-sitting.
One time, Delores was sitting in the backseat of the family car
with her two rambunctious brothers, who were increasingly out of
control. Afraid that she might not be able to manage them, panic
drove her to act the charade of control, which calmed her brothers.
The unspoken consequence of her success was to turn her into a
performer, a person who could act a role that others would believe.
Assuming such a role helped her mother, who was resistant to the
burden of her children’s miseries. Delores fell into the pattern of
acting like an adult to cover childish fears. But covered fears are not
outgrown. They smolder behind one’s defenses.
Fear of separation rules Delores’s life, much of which had its basis
in her mother’s narcissistic isolation as well as her dad’s
abandonment. Separation anxiety often has its origin in the period
around age two when the child needs to practice separation by
coming and going from his parent. The child returns periodically for
“refueling,” which means to feel the parent’s happy greeting
assuring him that all is well. A favorable response shows that his
independent action is acceptable and that the parent will be there
when needed.
Two of the parental reactions that can undermine the
development of autonomy are if a parent can’t let go or if a parent
lets go too quickly. Often there is a combination of these two with
the parent listing from one side to the other.
Delores’s moderately narcissistic mother probably clung to her
child at rst as an extension of herself. Once the child started to
separate, mother hastened the process because she was unable to
tolerate the coming and going. Feeling deserted by her husband,
who went to war, the actions of her child exacerbated such feelings,
so she prematurely disengaged from the child and demanded full
autonomy of her. A child who is afraid that the parent will not be
there upon her return becomes an adult who is afraid to let go of
her partner.
Delores gives evidence of such thinking in her early teenage baby-
sitting. She felt deserted by her mother when left in the car with her
young brothers. It itted through Delores’s mind that her mother
was not coming back at all. This relatively adult fear of being left
can be a repetition of the early childhood trauma she experienced
over her rst move into autonomy.
Evidence of a problem with unreliable parents is passed on to the
following generation. Delores’s son had phenomenal powers of
observation. I remember when he was about two and a half and
reminded me to take my sweater (which I was about to leave
behind). It was hanging on a hook in conglomeration with other
sweaters. “Elan,” he said, “you forgot your sweater.” When I asked
him about this memory for the book, he said, “I had to be totally
observant because I was afraid that Mom would leave without me. I
had to keep my eye on everyone. I knew where all my backup
people were, you and Elsa and Rose, in case I got left.”
We replay our traumas with our children. A woman fearing that
she will be forgotten by her mother and her dad raises a child who
fears that she in turn will be forgotten. Imparting similar fears to
our loved children reassures us of our parents’ loving motivation.
These problems show up with our mates and friends. Delores, who
feared that her mother would disappear, became an adult who
cannot bear to be alone. She does not feel connected with her
“signicant other” if he is physically absent. Having considerable
beauty and charm, she rarely lacks for companionship. The gaiety of
her surface denies the anxiety that lies beneath. More than just
liking male company, she has to have it.
Fear of solitude is shown by the immediate replacement of one
departing live-in lover by another. She promises herself (and her
friends) to live alone for a while but cannot. The speedy choice of
her next man is helped by his dependency. She plummets from man
to man, a chain of men, with few intolerable moments of emptiness
between. Her choice of dependent men is fed by her unmet and
early need for an unavailable mother and father.
As she grows fed up with the current man, she is grooming the
next. Her new man comes in the back door as the old one goes out
the front. In response to the power of her conviction and his need
for merger, the new man thinks he is the one who will last. For her,
he is a need-dependency-user man, a repeat of what led to the
demise of the relationship before. A man with a healthy ego takes
longer to establish his commitments since he looks before he leaps.
Delores is like two people. Her rst analyst said that she was like
“stones and water.” On the surface she is a leader and trailbreaker;
on the underside she is fearful and clinging, a woman who accepts
provocative abuse and is incapable of calling a spade a spade or a
punch a punch. People who know her well but are not predatory
nd it dicult to believe in the huge disparities between her actions
and attitudes. Delores herself has not integrated the strength that
she possesses. Having learned self-abnegation from her father’s cold
response to whatever did not concern himself, she thinks that the
price for assertiveness is desertion. Fear of abandonment supports
her choice of addicted, clinging men.
And yet, there is another side. The men she is so crazy for are
secretly “boarders” with whom she plays the role of submissive
victim. This means that there is a power she keeps restrained. If and
when she wills it, she can show them the door. Despite increasing
nancial independence her choice of men remains the same, as does
the role she plays with them. For a long while, she enacts the game
of the little girl with her narcissistic father, trying to get this self-
centered man to love her fully. When she tires of it and sees that the
relationship is going nowhere, she declares it to be over in a breezy
and irresistible way. The man who has been seeking a permanent
berth and reveling in her undemanding approach believes that he
has made it into heaven. He is shocked to learn that this is not his
survival train’s last stop.
Delores’s ego has grown stronger as she sees herself capable of
earning money. She feels the power of ownership, bought a hot tub
and a dishwasher, has with limited nances landscaped her lawn.
Her home had been creative but rudimentary. Now, even her sheets
and pillowcases match. But even with her increasing power, she
remains with David, her latest man, perhaps the most violent,
dependent, demanding, addicted, and ungiving of them all. David
may be closest to the model of her narcissistic father and she calls
them look-alikes, short and dark, slouched over with sardonic and
disapproving expressions.
Delores claims to not feel “that way” about him anymore. Six
years have gone by and he remains the same, refusing to produce
sucient income and unwilling to leave. If pressed to break it o,
he throws a tantrum and she caves in. He accuses her of having
destroyed his life, which plays on her sympathy. He says that rst
she took advantage of him and now wants to cruelly throw him out.
For good measure, he adds the threat of suicide.
David doesn’t try to please Delores sexually. When I asked her
why she didn’t get a dierent lover, she said that her work took all
her energy and she didn’t care much about sex. In this
rationalization there is the unstated pleasure in her pain. She said
that despite all the negatives, there is comfort in his companionship.
I was there at the outset of their relationship and saw how
unconscious paths are followed, how Delores got embroiled even
though she knew better. It was like eating an apple in the Garden of
Eden. “Just one bite and I’ll eat no more.” Once eaten, there’s no
turning back.
I was visiting Delores that afternoon. As we were together in her
car, she saw David tooling around her neighborhood on his bike.
They’d met the previous day and perhaps he hoped to run into her.
Delores and I were coming back from shopping when she spotted
him. I saw his dark hair and the pure, soulful expression of an angel.
Although I too was taken in at rst, I later learned that his choirboy
act was a cover for a satanic ego. He held on to her hand through
the open car window, and looked at her with melting eyes.
He invited us to visit him right away and we accepted, following
his bike in her car. It was the rst time that Delores had seen his
place, a small cottage set among trees in a quiet neighborhood,
college digs in an idyllic western town.
We entered the living room. Before us, a kitchen, two bedrooms,
and a bath. On the inside of the front door was a space-age poster
with physics formulas on it, some kind of insider’s joke. Also he had
an incredible collection of books and records, esoteric odds and
ends, all declaring “herein lives a head.”
From our freewheeling conversation, he appeared to be extremely
intelligent. I later learned that he had been valedictorian of a large
western high school. His level of education and plans were not
discussed. Delores didn’t care about his major and when or if he was
going to graduate. She wanted to know if he was going to be fun!
I was interested in such things and concluded that he was one of
those young men who hang out at a university for an indenite
time, sometimes taking classes but never completing the degree.
Time limits, degrees, vocation have nothing to do with the leisurely
experience of getting an education. He is a college “lifer,”
considerably younger than Delores and considerably older than his
classmates.
Our time together was very pleasant until we were interrupted by
the knock and entry of his landlady. She was very angry because she
claimed that he owed her a considerable sum of money. His
roommate was gone and he persisted in paying only half the rent.
How long the roommate had been gone, we do not know. How hard
David sought replacement is a moot point. He occupied the house
alone. He felt that looking for a roommate was enough to abrogate
his responsibility, that the landlady was an irrational pest who
wasted his time. He treated her with a combination of annoyance
and boredom. Why didn’t she take her petty problem and
disappear?
In the car on the way home, the drama we had witnessed alarmed
me. I babbled my anxious thoughts to Delores. “He’s a freeloader of
royal proportions. The world is owed to him. He thinks only of
himself and has no conscience about extortion. Don’t get involved.”
She agreed with me wholeheartedly. She usually agrees with the
wise counsel of her friends—and then goes straight ahead, propelled
by forces that have little to do with her ability to think.
That night, Delores had a premonitory dream in which her
unconscious mind was attempting to save her. A vampire bat was
buzzing around her throat and she was extremely frightened. We
discussed the dream. The vampire bat was this new man who was
looking to feed. A classic vampire plot shows a heroine who
succumbs to chthonic forces and sleeps while they consume her.
I left Delores at the end of my visit thinking that she had resolved
to nip the relationship in the bud, for that is what she told me. Years
later I recognized that when Delores spoke of a relationship that
made her unhappy, it was not with the intention of withdrawing.
She was ventilating her unhappy feelings so that she could continue
with the man.
David moved in by inches; rst his cartons were stored in her
garage and then loose items in her house. Little by little came the
man himself. He was working sporadically and beneath his native
capacity. At rst, he drove the local bus—when he got up in time.
Delores sometimes joined him on his route before she went to work,
giving it a party atmosphere. He often went to work late and took
absences, not wanting to disturb his precious mental tranquility
with trivial obligations. He had a roof over his head and didn’t need
to make the rent.
He pushed away the stresses of tawdry reality by smoking a lot of
homegrown grass, something Delores overlooked when trying to
understand his lackadaisical behavior. She had a way of turning a
blind eye to addictive behaviors that caused her trouble. Her own
drug use made her insensitive to its eects on others and led her to
deny its consequences. She smoked pot quite often and did acid
occasionally as part of the custom of the hippie culture.
She was at the beginning of her painting business, achieving a
degree of fame through paintings of prehistoric beasts, friendly
dinosaurs that munched on leaves and toothy tyrannosauruses. She
sold these paintings at fairs. David would take o from driving the
bus in order to accompany her. He would help her set up her
display and then hang out. His companionship pleased her. She only
became dissatised when she realized that he did not want to work
hard and would let her foot the bills. He didn’t always come up with
his share of the rent and food money. He ran up phenomenal phone
bills to a large family that was far away, saying high-handedly that
he would pay for his phone bill when he had the money. He never
thought of depriving himself at the moment. Delores was supposed
to take up the slack.
He showed how much he loved dependency when he squandered
a twelve-thousand-dollar inheritance from his deceased aunt.
Delores begged him to use the money to learn a skill, bookbinding,
in which he was interested, or the cooking which he loved. Instead,
he bought himself toys, including a synthesizer that he never
learned to play since lessons were not part of his budget. Practice
was too much like work. He preferred to doodle in music, free-form
and stoned. His inheritance was quickly spent.
Delores was horried, infuriated. Her ethic of work made her hate
his proigacy. At least he should get good at the synthesizer. Her
pressure on him to use his money wisely was responded to with
infantile rage since he wanted to remain on an eternal vacation.
Grass made this seem to be a feasible approach. On one of my later
visits, I asked him what he intended and he said, “I’m waiting for
my ship to come in.” But his ship had already come and he had sunk
it. In private Delores told me that his current ship was the S.S.
Delores.
She stayed with him. Or rather, he continued to live with her,
responding badly to any request and often sabotaging what he did
when forced to comply. He broke her rules, rejecting her needs in a
callous manner. If she asked him to feed the dog, he strewed her
ne, hand-thrown plates around her backyard. A thousand requests
would get something accomplished but she would pay for it.
He lived by the motto, “What is asked for will not be given.” His
memory for literary fact was phenomenal, for personal requests
imbecillc. It was shades of her narcissistic father. Sex was poor since
he refused to do what she asked and didn’t remember her requests.
If she put his hand where she wanted it, he would resist and remove
it as soon as she stopped holding it. He was rigidly and obstinately
unprogrammable. She didn’t look forward to sex with him and put
forth the rationalization that they were like an old married couple.
However, the real issue was that David would not give.
He hated women. His father had died of alcoholism and his large
family was held together by a controlling mother who would beat
him to the point that he feared for his life. All the world now
consisted of strong mothers who would pay for his suering.
Years went by. David claimed to be extremely depressed, as if
depression accounted for his nonfunctioning. Perhaps he was
depressed at functioning so poorly, but as an addictive person, his
primary motive was hanging on to the host. Friends asked Delores
what she was doing with a man who was not only predatory but not
nice. He didn’t compliment her for the things she did around the
house. His mouth was often compressed in a thin line, eyebrows
raised in disdain. His attitude was, “With such petty things do you
occupy your life.” And he used those things. He ate her food,
listened to her records, used her phone, slept in her bed. She hated
and loved this abuse. Like many children of narcissists, she is
addicted to the prickly, miserable, ungiving, self-centered meanness
of the unloving narcissistic parent.
David had been abusing her nancially for a long time, like
borrowing her son’s car, which she had just refurbished in order to
sell it. He then used the car for months! Even more fantastic was
Delores’s inability to ask for it back. She could only approach him
with a supplicating murmur. “David, please, I need the car.” For a
long time nothing happened. Repairing his own car would take
money that he lacked. He further ran down her car and reduced its
monetary value.
Delores’s fury was mounting beyond containment. Perhaps she
had developed the sense that she could survive without him when
she told him to come up with more money and laid out his areas of
insuciency. She pushed him too far. How he hated aggressive
women with their endless demands! His big hands went around her
throat, pushing her against a wall with her wind cut o, out of
breath, feeling strangled. It was no joke.
When he let up on his grip she was injured. Her neck was painful.
A vertebra was out of place. Terror penetrated her denial. For once,
she couldn’t bury her emotional experience and told her friends,
who panicked for her. They knew that she would forget her terror,
and they saw real danger in the couple staying together. Later, he
blamed his violence on her PMS! When Delores told me of this
event, she said that he had hurt her before this time as well.
Her friends got her to put him out and change the locks. They
asked her to go for an order of protection from the police, which she
kept putting o as her mind started to bury the incident. One could
feel her fear and the memory of his violence seep away. It was scary
to watch this happen. When she had to go on a business trip and her
plants needed watering, who did she ask to do the job, which
necessitated that he have the key? Her friends did not know of this.
By the time she returned from her trip, David had once more
ensconced himself in the house.
David remains with Delores. Little has changed except that time
has moved on. He has been destroyed by his unwillingness to stand
on his feet. Growth usually needs to occur within the appropriate
developmental periods or it doesn’t catch up. She still thinks of
getting rid of him but turns most of her energy to business. Sexual
aairs can be carried on in distant cities on business trips while he
remains in his ignorance at home. She considers trading him in for a
new man, but remains with the pleasure of his abusive ways. He
gives her very little and she continues to get something emotional
from it.
When Delores rst got into painting, she did a magnicent work
showing a unicorn with two heads. The head looking forward into
the future was a unicorn with a powerful horn. Looking backward
was the head of a traditional woman, wide-eyed, vulnerable, sweet,
and pretty.
The unicorn is a phallic beast, narcissistic in that it needs no one
and others need it. Its horn is a symbol of masculine power, like the
symbol of the narcissistic male as distinguished from the female
helplessness to which Delores was raised. At work, with friends, she
can be aggressive and even ruthless. She can use people, getting
around them with her charm. She accrues power and radiates a
narcissistic luminescence.
The backward-looking maiden is transxed by her past. It is the
submissive female who chains her man with her own enslavement.
It is the delicate woman who cannot raise her voice or say no. Her
true love is the narcissistic and vanishing father of childhood. She
never gave up her need for him because she is not in touch with the
feeling. She is unconscious of the origin of her replay. Blindly and
compulsively, she chooses men who feature the most narcissistic
and worst traits of dear old Dad.
These two heads looking in dierent directions are unaware of
each other. They operate in dierent spheres and from dierent
aspects of her personality. The forward-looking head denies the
inuence of the past. The backward head is too caught in its dream
to integrate. Each represents an extreme.
To heal the rift, Delores needs to slow down and to take a look at
both. Her current lifestyle is probably too successful to make her
want to deal with the suering that her backward head is causing
her, or to look at the suering that the forward head is causing
others. Perhaps later. She is a formidable lady and quite a
remarkable one. As her brother once said to me, “Our family
matures late.”
Delores and I are trying to learn to treat ourselves and others
well. We remind each other of our need for love, knowing that the
only one who can move us toward love is ourselves. We must learn
from experience in order to change, although the hardest thing to
change is one’s denition of love. We want to love a dierent kind
of person and to experience his generosity as love.
7
NO RIGHT TO LIVE IF YOU CANNOT LOVE: HOW A
NARCISSIST PUT HIS INABILITY TO LOVE ONTO HIS CHILD
The narcissistic parent puts what he
feels is unacceptable in himself onto his child, but the child does not
realize that she is a repository, accepting instead whatever the
parent feeds her as the truth. A child presumes good intentions since
the alternative is too frightening to consider. In this story, as in the
story of John, a child is forced to deal with her parents’ critical lack
of love.
Here we have Elan, a girl of eleven staying in the country with her
mother. Her parents are recently divorced. Her mother hates her ex-
husband with great intensity. She is a hater by nature, and
additionally is on the rebound from twelve years in the service of
his narcissistic grandiosity. She received no thanks. His philosophy
was to verbalize only fault. If you couldn’t appreciate yourself, you
were out of luck. Neither mother nor child was capable of doing
this.
Typically, even though both parents had full-time jobs, Mother
came home to do the cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and
serving. Father read his newspaper. He had been trained to do this
by his doting and narcissistic mother, who demanded that her boys
be “geniuses,” thereby creating in them vast feelings of inferiority
and a need to overcompensate. Elan’s mother remembers her
mother-in-law weeping when she saw her son, the college graduate,
washing dishes after his wife had cooked and served. She had stated
to herself, “I too am a college graduate.” But her need to create
bonds through dependency due to abysmal self-esteem, which made
her expect rejection, had kept her serving. Now it was over.
She was enjoying her rst weekend away from work in many
months in the log cabin that she had acquired with her ex-husband.
Her dealings with the little girl were extremely unstable and
changeable. Even though she loved the child very much, her
pressure-cooker personality led to constant verbal explosions of
rage, to endless criticism, and to an insistence that she do for the
child what the child wished to do for herself. She did not want her
child to be independent because here, too, she saw in that the
potential for abandonment.
Reeling from the blows of both parents’ criticism and caught in
her father’s egocentricity, the little girl had become extremely
compliant. All she wanted was to be sheltered from the endless rain
of blows to her ego. The child needed to nd value in herself and
some purpose for living. Her escape route and salvation was nature.
Communing with animals, her mind sailing on the wings of birds,
her senses drunk with the scent of owers, lulled by the buzzing of
bees, she was free.
She was an artist, creating an ecstatic and loving world to go to.
When one nds a child of a narcissist who is relatively intact after
surviving a horrendous childhood, one should look for the making
of art. Art heals.
She was what was, for her, an approximation of happy when old
Mr. Etzel, the proprietor of the general store a quarter of a mile
away, came limping down the road. They had no phone. From a
distance, he called out a breathless message. “Your father just
called. Your grandmother’s died and the funeral is tomorrow.” He
heeled around and started back up the road.
She didn’t know how she was supposed to react. She had no good
feelings for this grandmother, who took an interest only in her
grades, which were never good enough. What was she supposed to
do? She looked to her mother for guidance.
This was her mother’s rst vacation in a long time. She didn’t
want to drive straight back to the city. Besides, she had hated her
mother-in-law and could express her hatred through the little girl
without quite recognizing that she was doing so. She did not allow
herself to recognize the eect that the child’s actions would have on
the child’s position in her father’s family.
She told her daughter, “You do not need to go back today.
There’ll be enough time to be with the family tomorrow night.” The
girl accepted her mother’s decision with a feeling of trepidation.
Why would her father have called if he did not expect something of
her?
And yet the city was so far away. Whenever she was with one
parent it was as if the other resided in a foreign country. Her father
was distant in any case. He kept poor contact, calling infrequently,
and was always at least two hours o the appointed time of his
visits. She would sit looking out the window experiencing waves of
mounting hysteria, not knowing if he would come at all. She needed
him so and her mother did nothing to relieve her anxiety. Her
mother’s focus was on hating her ex-husband, not on comforting her
child.
He had treated his daughter as one who counted for very little
and her mother had seconded the motion. She obliged them both by
feeling so. A worthless person does not give her own opinion much
respect. She buried her anxieties about what her father might think
if she did not come immediately. Her mother had often helped her
to shirk responsibilities in the past.
The next evening, she entered her grandparents’ apartment. She
walked the long, dark hallway into the interior rooms. At the end of
the corridor she saw her aunts and uncles sitting on packing crates.
The mirrors were covered with cloth. She saw her father at the same
time that he saw her. He walked toward her. Was it grief that was
constricting his face? His expression seemed to hold something else,
something vaguely ominous. He seemed angry. He steered her back
down the hall to its darkest point, out of earshot of the relatives.
What he had to say was private, between the two of them. As she
walked she noticed the familiar old bronze vase atop the bookcase
and the two charming Chinese painted lamps with streamers and
dragons. Then she remembered her mother saying that after he
moved out, her father had sneaked in and removed these objects
from their home when no one was around. Her mind was empty,
vague, and disquieted.
Her father was grasping her shoulder with his bony ngers,
piercing her eyes with a pained and accusatory stare. He was
speaking. “… you have betrayed me.” The child attempted to pay
closer attention to what he was saying. He was speaking about her
not attending the funeral. She had committed a crime. She would
not be allowed to blame her mother for staying away. That he held
her responsible for being a poor grandchild, although he
exaggerated and she had been abetted by her mother’s resistance to
her going and unwillingness to drive her there, also touched upon
her readiness to feel guilty.
He spoke in conspiratorial tones. His voice was grieving yet
angry. “Your grandmother always loved you.” This must be part of
her deciency, since she was unable to feel that love. “Your not
attending the funeral was …” He was searching for the perfect
weapon. She felt the knife poised above her with the satisfaction of
one about to be immolated. “… it showed that you really are …
unable to love anyone.” Satisfaction came from serving her constant
role as victim, which met his need and hopefully made him happy.
The knife struck. She felt a erce pain. Then went numb. The
truth was out. Something inside of her gave way, the thin gray
thread that bound her to other people. Her true self tumbled to the
bottom of a deep well, leaving only a feeling of emptiness. Now she
understood her father’s endless attempts to correct her, her mother’s
rages and accusations. She had lost her shaky standing as a human
being since the coin of love is the only real interchange between
them. Love generates love and she was bankrupt.
From now on, she would shun close contact. She would stay deep
inside herself, looking out at the world as if through a periscope.
Where were her feelings? Gone. Her father had declared it so. Her
self lay in shambles at the bottom of the sea. Hope for the future
was eliminated. All the years of questioning and torture now made
sense.
Years later, after many years of psychotherapy, she comes to a
realization. Amid tears of joy she sees that she loves. She has always
loved. Her father, confronted by his mother’s deathbed, found
himself unable to feel for the person who had been closest to him.
How could he avoid accusing himself of heartlessness—unless he
could put the fault onto a scapegoat. His daughter was to be
sacriced. He was safe.
The person who could not love was really he.
8
THE DESTRUCTIVE INNER PARENT: VICTORIA
Because the child of a narcissist is
battered from earliest childhood—criticized, ignored, manipulated—
he or she tends to develop a powerful negative introject, an inner
representation of the rejecting parent. The introject embodies the
demands the child is supposed to meet in order to gain parental
approval. We have seen strong examples of this negative introject in
previous chapters, as when Anne could not drive her customers to
their destinations. The introject also embodies parental rage at the
child for failing to meet his standards, as when John grew utterly
depressed for not getting good grades. Because the introject is so
harsh, it can never be fully integrated into the personality as a
normal conscience. It leads a person like John to make a suicidal
gesture for doing poorly at school. The negative introject always
feels like a foreign, attacking entity. Its cruelty comes from the
unmitigated hostility of the parent as well as the anger of the child
at his frustrations.
Internalized anger and harsh inner rules need to be softened and
balanced by the experience of parental love. This is how one
develops a reasonable conscience. But for the child of a narcissist,
love is in short supply. Therefore, the negative introject remains
destructive and takes up the parent’s cause from inside the child,
hating him and telling him not to do and be.
A person raised by nonnarcissistic parents also has internalized
rules and consequences. He feels “signal anxiety” when
contemplating an action that goes against his value system. If he
transgresses, he may suer a degree of guilt and even some mild
depression. This self-imposed punishment keeps his behavior under
the control of his system of morality.
Anxiety, guilt, and depression are kept within reasonable bounds
since his conscience is modeled on his parents’ reasonable attitudes.
Normal parents basically accept their child even when he does
wrong. They condemn the bad behavior without rejecting the child.
Conversely, the negative introject acts from within as a punishing
enemy. It creates such severe anxiety that it paralyzes, produces
such powerful guilt that the individual feels totally worthless.
Depression, guilt, and inner conict tear the person apart.
Since the desire to reform and control was an important
motivation on the part of the narcissistic parent, this becomes part
of the intentions of the negative introject. When a person suering
from a powerful negative introject falls in love, the loved one is
reacted to as a part of the self. When we fall in love, there is a
merging of ego boundaries and a sense of oneness. This brings into
play the aggression of the introject, which starts criticizing and
reforming the loved one, who now is subject to one’s personal self-
hatred. The sudden switch from total love and acceptance to hatred
and rejection causes the loving persons to doubt their own sanity.
They will painfully come to doubt their ability to love. Such is the
story of Victoria.
Victoria is excited. A new day has begun and her changes are
unmistakable. Arrogance is giving way to sympathy, irresponsibility
to order. She is less selsh and greedy, more considerate. She is
beginning to like herself. To herald these changes, she has
developed a sexual relationship with a man. This is after a ve-year
hiatus of cloistered lesbianism. Lesbianism can be a healthy sexual
choice or the result of self-deprivation. In Victoria’s case, having
had a mother who called her inadequate and kept her from her dad
resulted in a lifelong inhibition of her heterosexual urges. Victoria
fears that no man would want to be with her.
The previous six months had been full of agony as the probe of
therapy opened the trapdoor to her obsessive self-loathing. She had
been drowning in it, had undergone a major psychological house-
cleaning, and now it was over. Relief seemed to be in sight. Seemed
to be.
To top o the list of changes, she had begun to take care of her
body, that aspect of herself that she had always treated as an
unacceptable burden. Before, she had only abused it, would binge
on sweets and ignore nourishing food, get fat and take diet pills to
slim down, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and trip on
psychedelics.
If she exercised at all, it was because she was forced to. She hated
being confronted by her image in the mirror, seeing all that jiggling
esh. Suddenly, when the self-hatred abated, she discovered her
body. She was like a baby exploring its toes. She entered into her
body and moved it around. She liked breathing hard after
exercising, feeling the ground solid beneath her feet. She liked to
stretch and pull her muscles and was beginning to feel alive all over.
She started having orgasms during sex. Her orgasms were not as
good as other women’s, of this she was sure. But they were orgasms.
All was going rather well until the arrival of Kali, which is what
she named the feeling of driven hatred for weakness in others,
especially in those she was close to. She didn’t only hate their
weaknesses, she hated them for having it.
Kali is the Hindu deity of world destruction. She is a terrifying
vision with a blackened face and a necklace of skulls draped around
her neck. Half-devoured human bodies fall from her mouth. Kali is
not a pleasurable identication.
Victoria felt that her own self was lost, buried in the goddess and
carried along by her wrath. Her Kali-self attacked people she cared
for, wounding them over and over. She hated herself for harming
but was drawn with the same addictive power that she felt toward
all destructive passions in her life. Once in the vortex of rage, she
had to explode.
Her words were meant to expose faults. They were uttered with
utmost scorn. She unleashed lethal words. She demanded that her
target change his or her behavior on the spot to become more
eective. She rationalized that she was a surgeon cutting out rotting
esh, only the surgery was not elective.
Most of all, she hated her boyfriend for his weakness. It is no
accident that she had chosen a man who could not ght back, since
that was the trait she despised the most. After knowing him about
half a year, they decided to take an extremely exotic trip. This
destination represented the need of both to get away from ordinary
life. Victoria especially sought freedom from her narcissistic
mother’s control by delving into the esoteric. The hope that one can
leave behind what one carries within one’s mind is usually quickly
dispelled.
Her Kali-self was a constant during their long vacation. In
Bangkok, her boyfriend insisted that they stay in a hotel described
in his travel guide. He liked to be guided by authority. The hotel
turned out to be inadequate, perched on a noisy intersection where
the beeping of taxi horns and ringing of bicycle bells was deafening.
Standing in the center of their room, they had to yell to be heard
over the roar of the trac.
Victoria didn’t want to stay. Her boyfriend did. He always resisted
change since the known was less frightening than the unknown. She
spoke to him scornfully. “Look at what you’ve chosen. This place
stinks. Only an idiot would put up with it. I’m leaving and if you
don’t come, I’ll go without you.” She rose. He got up, silently
trudging beside her. As they walked the unfamiliar streets she
continued her attack. She hated him because he so clearly
manifested her own fears. He was supposed to be the strong one,
but he wasn’t.
She got him to ask directions of a passerby who knew some
English. Almost immediately he got confused over what he had
heard. Victoria called him stupid. After stammering out his
befuddled directions, he fell back into sullen silence. She knew that
she was turning him into a helpless baby. He never fought her
directly but withdrew. Her mood of despair deepened when he
insisted on having lunch in the same restaurant they had gone to for
breakfast. Why was she with such a ninny? She wanted to claw his
bland face. She resorted to ripping words instead.
He did not make love to her that night. He had not made love to
her for weeks. He went to bed early. She sat on the bed berating
him for his low energy level, which made it necessary to get ten
hours of sleep. The more she nagged, the sleepier he got, sinking
away from her into oblivion. Once he was asleep, she felt
abandoned and was conscience-stricken once more.
She became cold with fear. Wouldn’t he eventually leave her, the
only man who had ever oered a commitment? His leaving seemed
as intolerable as his staying. She hated his submissiveness.
He demonstrated the same low energy, slinking away from
conict, that she had once manifested in her own family, a hive of
manic aggression. Then she had been the one who passively
succumbed. It was her mother who reviled her for being a shy
introvert.
Her mother was the classic narcissist. She had what it takes to be
the center of attention: an extremely beautiful face with porcelain
skin, blond hair, a ne gure, brains, ambition, and extreme
feistiness. Despite the above, she was unbelievably insecure.
Like many insecure people, she was grandiose. She needed to be
worshiped as a supreme being. Victoria and the rest of the family,
her sister and father, deferred. The main focus was her mother’s
looks. Victoria still believes that her seventy-year-old mother is
more beautiful than she.
Her father’s role was to run interference for his wife, to see that
her glory was properly heralded. He was her exclusive possession.
His eyes and words were for her alone. He would tell his daughters,
“Girls, your mother is a knockout, the greatest, a killer, the best-
looking at the pool, etc.” Looks were the most important thing in
the world. But what about his daughters? Didn’t they have looks
too? They were not about to hear about it from him.
Victoria worshipped her mother, who “got it all,” but held on to
the secret, disloyal wish that her father would beam a few words of
praise her way. Her mother’s unwritten law determined that he was
to make no contact with this daughter. Victoria and her father were
to be the mother’s slaves and to relate only through her. As a result,
Victoria did not suciently develop her heterosexual identity. In
our culture, the father denes the female role. It is through her
interaction with him that the child learns how to be a woman. But
Victoria was allowed to relate only to her mother, who continually
attempted to renovate her into an acceptable state. As her mother’s
possession, she was not to have the pleasure of men. This is one
foundation of lesbianism. Being raised by an emotionally
withholding mother who turned her from men also led her to seek
the love of women.
Her mother had been raised by a destructive mother, a paranoid
who hated and rejected this child. Victoria’s mother had to deal
with intense self-hatred. Instead of openly questioning her own
worth she unconsciously placed her feelings of inadequacy onto the
one nearest, her daughter. From the safety of her remove, she could
hate and reject Victoria’s faults without ever recognizing that she
herself was the subject. Victoria had been raised to believe that she
merited her mother’s scorn. She saw herself as disgusting, “more a
toad than a woman.”
She surrendered to her mother, the “all-knowing one.” She
swallowed the pain of personal attack and palliated her misery also
by oral means, bingeing herself senseless. In grade school, she was
already “a little fat girl.” She felt as she looked, awkward,
incompetent, and hopeless. The appetites of her body were out of
control. As her physical appearance changed, she grew frightened.
She no longer recognized herself. Could those be her thighs? Was
she inside that increasing mound of blubber? When the body loses
its natural shape, the mind also grows distorted since body image
and intactness of mind are intimately connected.
Amidst the fusillade of her mother’s attacks, she began to hear the
distant babble of hallucinated voices, like the sound of a radio when
the pointer is between stations. That terried her. She was saved
from a full descent into madness by her older sister’s
uncharacteristic willingness to listen to her problem, reassuring her
that she was not alone. Her sister and she were usually isolated from
one another. Victoria was her mother’s emotional property and her
sister was her dad’s. It was rare that Victoria could share what she
was feeling with another being. Instead of communication, there
was only the terrible force of her mother’s verbalized hatred
presented under the guise of love. There was not one thing in her
life that Victoria could hold on to, not one thing about herself that
was worthy of respect.
Food became the center of her existence. Food represented love.
The availability of food meant security. She spent her entire
allowance on candy bars and crammed them into her mouth, six at a
time. She made midnight raids on the refrigerator to wolf down ice
cream out of the plenteous supply that was always to be found.
There is a double message to a child who is a compulsive eater
when the family keeps ice cream and other high-calorie foods on
hand. Double messages were the rule here. Victoria’s mother would
tell her, “You must diet. I want you slim,” and then provide the
fattening foods her daughter found irresistible. The covert message,
of course, was that Victoria should eat, that fatness was acceptable,
even desirable. But why would her mother want to do this to her?
The answer was obvious. Victoria was turning into a beauty. Her
mother could not accept a rival.
Like the Wicked Witch in Snow White, she needed to hear her
mirror say, “You are the fairest of them all.” Along with the
intention of improving Victoria’s appearance, which represented a
projection of her own fear of ugliness, there was also the opposite
need, to maim and undermine her rival. Her improvement campaign
drove Victoria into the shadows. Victoria had intimations of her
own beauty but also believed the opposite about herself. She
accepted the destruction of her looks as the vehicle to her mother’s
acceptance.
Let us follow the history of Victoria’s mane of blond hair, her
glory. It was so long she could sit on it. Everyone admired this hair,
her most beautiful feature. Her classmates regarded it as a
communal treasure. She felt that the color and length of her hair
gave her value. In a family that worshiped looks, her hair was her
most important feature.
She was an undisciplined child, a chatterbox whose main comfort
in life was talking to her friends. She repeatedly got low grades in
conduct. When she was in about the fourth grade, her mother
decided to make a federal case of it, and threatened to cut o the
hair unless her conduct mark improved. Victoria was panicked and
told her classmates, who shared her fear and banded together to
write a communal letter begging her mother to spare the hair. Even
her teacher got involved, not wanting to be the lead agent of a
massacre. He upped her grade in conduct.
Presumably the grade was not good enough, or perhaps her
mother was already set on the punishment for other ancient crimes,
for the hair did come o. Her mother wielded the scissors, snipping
until the uneven strands were shoulder length. It no longer fell
beneath Victoria’s waist, no longer rested beneath her buttocks
when she sat. She felt very diminished and depressed. She believed
that she had somehow deserved the punishment.
A second assault was made on her glorious blond hair like a halo
around her face (it was glorious again since hair will grow back)
when she was about fourteen. Her parents had gone out. A self-
conscious and overweight Victoria had sauntered into the kitchen to
make herself a sandwich when a group of boys from her class
happened to pass by. They looked in the window, catching her in
the act of eating. Because of her weight problem this so embarrassed
her that she covered up by acting sophisticated, and invited them in.
Usually, she was not so accessible.
The boys had made themselves at home in her living room when
her parents drove up. They were astonished to see male heads go
sailing by the window in the usual hyperactive way of adolescents
and jumped to the incredible conclusion that their reclusive
daughter was in the midst of an orgy. They resolved to catch her in
the act. Their latent violence was ready.
Her mother took the front door and her father the back. At a
given moment, they exploded into the house. The boys scattered
and escaped but Victoria was their actual prey. They pursued her
into the kitchen as she ed before them.
Not a single question was asked. She was thrown to the oor.
They shoved and kicked her until her mother spotted the kitchen
shears hanging on a hook. Instantly the blond hair came o in
ragged hanks.
Later Victoria contemplated her mangled head in the mirror. Her
once beautiful hair stuck out at odd angles. Her usual sense of
having something special about her appearance was gone. She had
already forgotten their absurd accusations of illicit sex and
connected the incident with her sin of eating a sandwich. At least
that made some kind of sense. She had broken her diet, hadn’t she?
Victoria attempted to nd order and justice in her parents’ actions.
She didn’t want to think that she was living with irrational tyrants.
That would be too much to assimilate. She withdrew further.
Victoria tells one nal hair story. She was about to leave for
college and felt extremely insecure about her appearance, although
she had managed to diet down a bit. Her mother came up with a
new suggestion for improvement that involved reshaping her
hairline. She was to shave her forehead to create a widow’s peak
instead of her own natural hairline. So she shaved her forehead,
convinced that she was ugly without heavy makeup and all the
subterfuge of illusion. Acceptance depended on this elusive beauty.
She was living her life on thin ice.
Now let us look at the other depredations orchestrated by a
narcissistic mother on her daughter’s body. Preoccupied with
Victoria’s weight, she mocked the girl’s overeating and despaired of
her ever being slim. While harping on her diet and on self-control,
she bought an abundance of extra-large and shapeless clothing for
her and stued the refrigerator with high-calorie desserts, which
were forbidden to her child. Such behavior belied her stated desire
that Victoria be slim and seemed to endorse obesity. Victoria
accepted her mother’s verdict that she could not master her
problem.
At puberty, her body ballooned out, sprouting breasts that were
rapidly becoming huge. Her mother stued those breasts into long-
line bras that were boned to the hips. Rather than disguising their
size, the bras made her breasts stand out like battleships. Her
protruding belly was constricted by a rubber girdle with holes in it
that tortured her esh by creating rubs and puckers and leaving her
stomach dotted with small red marks that faded after a few hours
without the girdle. She concealed her breasts and belly beneath a
billowing man’s shirt or walked around in a long coat regardless of
the season. Boys had begun to show an interest in her breasts and
this rather frightened her. Nothing in the way her father had treated
her as a child had prepared her for the sexual desire of men.
By then her mother, who was a nurse, had introduced her to diet
pills to help her control her eating. With the pills came the implicit
message, “You are weak and will have to depend on outside agents
to keep yourself in line.” The stage was set for further addictions,
the rst, of course, being diet pills. In time were added alcohol,
sugar, tobacco, and diet shots. Victoria was to be a person propped
up from the outside, always seeking a new crutch to lean on to help
her to control her unruly self.
In junior high school and before any of the other girls, her mother
introduced her to makeup in order to correct her “sh eyes,” till
then a deformity of which she had been unaware. Her mother said
Victoria had sh eyes because her lashes were too light. Now she
felt even more like a freak, rst because of her sh eyes, which
needed correcting, and second because she was the only girl in her
class in makeup. All she really wanted was to t in with the rest of
the kids.
Her mother encouraged her to enter summer stock as she had
done in her youth. Her mother’s many instructions were directed at
helping her daughter create a dramatic mask to hide behind.
Victoria was being induced to develop the defenses and attitudes of
narcissism. O she went to summer stock in her heavy makeup and
men’s shirts. Theater helped her develop the art of seduction. She
used her manner and appearance to gain the interest of men but
quickly discarded anyone who tried to get too close.
She developed a crush on a pathetic bearded alcoholic in the
company. He represented Victoria’s discarded self. They drank
together and kept their masks in place. She acquired beautiful
diction, a clipped, stage English, and the same imperious manner
she had always admired in her mother. If anyone had asked her how
she actually looked and came across, she wouldn’t have had the
foggiest notion. She was all aectation and no substance. Her true
self was in hiding.
Her mother engineered one nal and major attack upon her body,
the most devastating and irreparable of all. Victoria had returned
home from her rst semester at college. She had been very erratic,
strung out on amphetamines and unable to concentrate. Overeating
had been the only means of bringing herself down. She would steal
other girls’ diet pills and add them to her store. Hoarding them
increased the magical power that kept her from coming apart.
When she came home for school break, the young woman was
huge, monstrous and passive as a stone. She refused to leave the
house and chance being seen by someone she knew.
Her mother had a brainstorm. As usual, her method of helping
focused on appearance. Why did she continue to think that direct
work on appearance was the answer to psychological problems
when such solutions had never helped before? Narcissists do not ask
such questions. They are like the surgeon who announces, “The
operation was a success but the patient died.” Lack of humility is
the mark of a shaky ego. It leads to the inability to learn from
mistakes. One must go on doing the same things as proof of one’s
infallibility. In addition, the mother was still projecting her own
ugliness onto her daughter and felt compelled to ameliorate it.
This time she focused on her daughter’s breasts. They were too
large and in need of “remediation.” A breast operation would
change those “cowlike udders” into “nice, high, girlish breasts.” Fat
was to be sucked out of each breast from the bottom. Victoria went
along passively, as usual.
She emerged from the operation with two ugly scars, like the
toothless grins of old men. That is how she presented their image to
me although I have never seen them. She said that a lover later
reacted with concern, which conrmed the worst of her fears. She
was deformed. Her scars would be in her mind any time she had to
disrobe to make love with a man. Wouldn’t his face fall in
disappointment when he saw? By virtue of distraction, the tire of fat
she put on around her middle actually helped disguise the scars.
Despite her powerful self-hatred, she managed to graduate from
college and then from graduate school. She became a social worker
who was a psychotherapist. Many children of narcissists go into the
psychological helping professions, being well schooled to be
sensitive to the needs of others. She was neither a success nor a
failure at her work. Believing herself a failure, she would never stick
long enough at practice-building to get anywhere. She read signs of
her inadequacy in the usual diculties of getting started.
Programmed to be an underachiever by her mother, she took far
too many breaks to establish patient trust. She was sabotaging
herself and rationalized it by saying, “I just had to get away. I am
too sensitive to the noise and ugliness of the city.” Each time she
returned from a lengthy trip, a signicant number of patients would
have left. Unconsciously, she was still clinging to her mother by
having an unsuccessful professional life.
Still, Victoria never stopped studying and learning, partly out of
an exaggerated insecurity fostered by her mother. She was always
broadening her understanding of psychotherapy. She would call her
mother for a booster shot of self-doubt, describing her latest project
or course of study. Her mother would respond with predictable
scorn, saying, “Why would you want to study a peculiar thing like
that?” Or she would plant the seed of doubt by asking, “Do you
really think you can do it?” She reminded Victoria of her rightful
place in life, somewhere beneath her mother in all things.
Though her lifestyle was nominally hedonistic, Victoria was
fullling her narcissistic mother’s edicts. She neglected and
undermined her profession, health, appearance, and desire for a
male lover. Everything constructive was avoided. All that remained
were the secretly addictive and destructive pleasures condoned by
her mother. She still had the glamour of marvelous red hair and
blue eyes, an elegant face, and theatrical expression. Beneath her
glamorous facade, Victoria felt despair.
Let us fast-forward through the years. A rst therapist who
limited Victoria by accepting her as the lesbian that she didn’t want
to be was replaced by a second who saw other options. Thus far,
Victoria has not been very happy with either women or men as
lovers. She has always played the Kali game against them and hated
herself as a result. A person who hates herself cannot much love her
partner. Sexual pleasure has been limited with partners of either
sex. The man is never considered strong enough or thought to have
an adequate penis. The female lover is thought devoid of the
necessary organ and pleasure with her deemed unimportant. Sexual
confusion reigns.
Is it only Victoria’s self-evaluation that says any orgasm she has is
not good enough or is she truly holding back? Victoria has sex with
her boyfriend, a man who, like her father, accepts peace at any
price. She reviles him and hates herself for persecuting him. She is
in her mother’s role, acting toward him as her mother did toward
her father, as her sister did to her boyfriend. She is acting as she
vowed she never would.
She wants the impossible, that her submissive boyfriend will stop
her. She wants him to release her from the maternal introject (inner
parent) of her Kali rage. She wants to set free the man in her female-
dominated father. She wants to be a woman who can be sexually
close to and satised by a man.
Homosexuality can be a neurotic sexual choice but it doesn’t have
to be. Victoria’s sexual orientation is ambivalent and unclear. Raised
to be her mother’s possession, she accepted not being with men.
Now she fears the rejection by men because she feels inadequate.
Although attracted to men, she is separated from them by scornful
arrogance, the concealing mask she copied from her mother.
She believes that she has never had a satisfactory orgasm with
either a man or a woman. However, it is hard for a person with a
poor self-image to assess her own experience. She desires to be
sexual with men. Motivation has a lot to do with what we become.
If Victoria can undo her conicts over sexual pleasure and her fear
of a man touching her, she may come to enjoy a sexual relationship
with men.
With her current boyfriend, at times she attains a measure of
objectivity and knows that her behavior is unjustied. Often she is
overwhelmed by the urge to criticize and she feels no mercy for her
victim. After her Kali t is over, she feels horribly guilty and
ashamed.
To free herself, Victoria needs to know in her guts, not merely in
her head, that what she hates in others is the weakness she nds in
herself. The desire to hurt the weak directly expresses her
identication with her mother, who attacked her for weakness. If
her boyfriend is timid, so was she. If she hates him for spending too
much time in the bathroom, so did she. Her parents hated her for
being a bed-wetter and a pants-wetter. (They had traumatized her
by starting toilet training far too early.)
What she does to others is a replay of what was done to her. Her
boyfriend is a mirror for her weak and despised inner child, closely
connected with her true self. If she can nd compassion for her own
weakness and timidity, she will become kinder to him and her true
self will begin once more to grow. Kali-hatred cannot exist with
compassion.
Finally, when her mother criticizes and corrects her, she does not
have to accept the assignment. She can give up courting her
mother’s love by being the repository of her mother’s hatred.
9
A LIFE DEVOID OF MOTIVATION: NICK
Nick is the son of a severe narcissist
who crushed Nick’s natural self. This injury is evident in Nick’s lack
of motivation and enthusiasm. His story shows how his father
progressively demoralized him and created emotional paralysis.
Nick thinks himself unworthy of anything positive. Due to the
process of identication with the aggressor, Nick continues to treat
himself and others in an abusive way. He continues to exist on the
slave level where his father originally placed him.
He is terried by the extreme destructiveness of his negative inner
parent (negative introject) and lives his life partly in bed like a little
baby to protect himself and the world from its aggression. He fears
that he will be murdered from within if he becomes autonomous
and starts living. The model for this murderous introject was his
father, himself full of rage. He may actually have sexually assaulted
Nick as a very young child, although Nick’s memories of the
possible event are represented only symbolically by his dreams.
Nick’s resentment at having been subjected to his narcissistic
father’s will is expressed indirectly. He does not even know that it is
anger that directs him to the path of negativity. He destroys his
career, leaving his father nothing to boast about; he avoids social
activities so that his father will be deprived of grandchildren. His
lack of funds creates indebtedness, which shows his power over
other people, etc. He is ignorant of the rebellious nature of his
passivity and so is unable to change it. Nick thinks only that he
(Nick) “doesn’t care.” He needs to develop the ego strength that will
allow him to say no directly to the external parent who still
attempts to direct him, but most of all to the threatening and
punishing inner parent (the negative introject) that would crush
him. He needs to declare, “Even if you don’t approve, it’s my life
now.”
Nick told me of a dream. He is standing on a rock surrounded by a
dark and angry sea. Waves lap at his ankles. He is alone.
In another dream, he is standing on a dilapidated dock
surrounded by rotting piers, abandoned boats, and the stumps of
fallen-down jetties. He feels like a hobo, at one with the otsam and
jetsam of the sea. He has nowhere to go.
Nick’s father has also contributed a dream. In it he was
conscripted into military service but didn’t want to go because the
job could be dangerous and unpleasant. He thought, “I shall send
Nick instead.” This appears to be a good solution. Nick is
expendable while he, the father, is not.
Nick’s waking life also has the quality of a dream. He is somewhat
detached from reality. Often he does not work but lies in bed
watching TV, getting up only to go into the kitchen to make a pot of
spaghetti, which is then eaten with the requisite quarter stick of
butter. Nick rarely eats anything else. He is overweight.
Nick turns away from commonplace necessities, laughs o
monetary problems, and borrows money from his friends. He often
forgets to return the money but is so generous with his time and
energy that his friends let the debts slide. Nick postpones and delays
all decisions. He is procrastinating his way through life. He has no
sexual or love relationship and has not had either for a long time. A
relationship would take too much eort. Too much would be
expected of him.
He leads a life devoid of options. He can see things happening
only one way. There are overtones of fatalism and defeat. As long as
Nick can lie snuggled in his bed, he is safe. He has the rosy cheeks
and wide-open eyes of an infant, one without a care in the world.
Nick has never grown up, although he is approaching forty.
Adulthood could be too dangerous. He is the irresponsible child who
has let the bills accumulate and binges on ice cream and spaghetti
drenched in butter. Fortunately, he is a talented architect and when
work comes to him—he never looks for it—he will do a ne job. He
is not a self-starter, but once the engine is turned on, he can work.
He learned to be a compulsive and meticulous worker from his
father, who demanded that he give his all. First he repaired his
father’s boat and car and then began to think about design.
But Nick derives no pleasure from his work nor from life itself.
Architecture is what he is doing until he gures out what he “wants
to do” with his life. Other people might be overjoyed to have such a
skill, but Nick is fully capable of wasting it. He says that talent is
not compulsion. “Why should I be compelled to do something that I
don’t enjoy just because I’m good at it?” Nick’s life indicates that he
is not committed to anything.
The only thing that Nick respects is friendship. He is a true friend
to other people, although not to himself. He will paint his friends’
apartments, schlepp their furniture, even oer free architectural
advice since “it’s not worth anything anyway.” He also listens freely
to problems and oers sound advice. He gives away much of his
time and energy, and when he works he undercharges. He gives
little to himself in the way of pleasure, except food. He stymies all
his own wishes. If anything interesting is happening in the world
outside, something that appeals to his friends, he generally walks
away from it.
Nick has always walked out on life. This started in kindergarten
when he strolled away from class because “it didn’t interest me.”
Years later, he walked out of his architecture class in the middle of
his nal year, thereby managing not to get a degree. An architect
can function without a degree. People learn of Nick’s ability and call
on him to work for them. But being without a degree or license has
left him handicapped, since others have to sign his work. He is
eligible for the licensing exam since architecture is a eld where
experience can be substituted for classwork. But Nick does not take
the exam. He rationalizes self-castration by saying, “The exam and
degree are not important,” and “I don’t know what I want to do,”
and “I don’t care.” His most characteristic comment is, “I think I’ll
stay put.” This is given in response to any suggestion that he shift
gears, whether to have fun, expand his talent, meet new people, or
leave the shelter of his home.
How was such a talented and compassionate man turned into a
limpet, a person leading a life without meaning? Let us begin with
his father, the narcissist. Nick’s father was a self-centered tyrant
raised by distant relatives who had no aection for him. Eventually,
he became a sea captain, which suited his defensive needs perfectly.
A captain can indulge his need for sadistic dominance with lucrative
returns while serving a socially useful purpose. Every narcissist was
once a rejected child. It was too dangerous for Nick’s father to let
people become necessary to him in a personal way.
He re-created the same structure within his family as on board his
ship. The family were his crew, slaves who jumped to fulll his
whims and endeavored to meet his perfectionistic standards lest
they be subjected to his cutting attacks. Nick’s father frequently
lashed out in verbal rage over trivia. He was obsessed with
cleanliness and would pounce on such crimes as a footprint on the
deck of his pleasure boat or an object not returned to its proper
place. He had something critical to say about most everything. He
liked to mock people and would tease his son about his baby fat or
the way he walked. Nick was under constant scrutiny and became
unbearably self-conscious.
His father attacked Nick’s ego. He especially liked to pull practical
jokes to humiliate his son.
Nick was about eight years old and attending a private
elementary school. On this particular day, he was serving detention
as he had done on so many other occasions because he had not done
his homework. The other children were out playing in the yard
during a free period when his father happened to pass by. Seeing
that Nick was not among them, he made inquiries as to what had
happened.
That evening there was company. Nick’s father started to quiz him
in front of the guests, who were a good audience. They were
laughing at his father’s jokes and not showing a smidgen of feeling
for Nick’s situation. Such folk are often the friends of narcissists and
are sometimes narcissists themselves or children of narcissists,
trying to win the narcissist’s aection. Nick did not know that he
was being set up. He did not think much about his situation. It was
too painful. He lived his life in an emotional fog.
“How did school go today?” his father asked. “Fine,” Nick
answered and he was not even lying. Detention was an
unremarkable event. “Did anything happen to you?” “No.” And so it
went until the story of Nick’s detention was drawn out of him, at
which point the entire company, led by his father, laughed
uproariously. Nick squirmed in humiliation.
A second memory of the progressive extinguishing of his self
occurred when Nick’s father forced him to betray his feelings. Nick
was crying because his father had hit him for doing something
wrong. What it was he cannot remember. He was about ve years
old. His father did not like the sound of Nick’s weeping. It might
have made him feel guilty over abusing the child. On a deeper level,
it probably stirred up a memory of his own hated, abused, and
rejected inner child, the weak part of himself that he despised. He
needed to cancel out any reminder of that vulnerable part, to attack
it sadistically as he, the child, was once perhaps attacked by his
foster parents.
He glared at his son and said, “Nick, I want you to stop crying
immediately.” Nick felt confused. His father’s expression was mean.
He wanted to please his father to gain his love. His father said,
“Nick, I want you to laugh, right now.” Nick’s inner world spun with
the abruptness of the transition. He laughed. He surrendered his
sense of self in order to win approval and with that surrender he
turned to stone. He felt nothing. He was only going through the
motions of human interaction. Some vital inner connection had been
broken. It went on like this for an endless series of surrenders. This
particular event stands out in Nick’s memory because it symbolizes
a high degree of self-rejection as well as having been an emotional
trauma.
In a nal memory, Nick’s father’s ship had returned to the States
after a year in Japan. Nick was standing on the dock eagerly
awaiting his father’s appearance. At the age of nine, he was excited
and lled with expectation. Every little boy loves and needs his
father no matter how he has been treated. Nick jumped up and
down scanning the people on the deck.
Suddenly he saw his father walking down the gangplank and
rushed forward, arms outstretched. When Nick reached his father he
was pushed away. His father would not embrace him. It is possible
that the man felt shy about showing emotion in front of his crew,
but later, in the privacy of their home, he still did not put his arms
around his son. Nick felt annihilated. He said, “I felt as if I didn’t
count. I was a nothing.”
What sustains all people is the belief that they are lovable and
that they will be loved. If your parent cannot love you, then who
will? Nick’s father had extinguished that hope.
The child does not blame his parent for not loving him. He cannot
let himself see that his parent may lack the ability to love because
then he would have nothing to live for. It would destroy hope for
the future. Instead, he believes that the fault lies within himself and
can still be corrected. Yet in accepting that he is responsible for his
parents’ rejection of him, he is so devalued that his self is destroyed.
If the child is treated as nothing, he must be nothing.
One irony of Nick’s situation is that he acquired so many of his
father’s narcissistic traits. Nick’s mixture of attitudes is found in
many children of narcissists. He can be submissive, rebellious, or
controlling. He uctuates between his parents’ roles: his submissive
and victimized mother, his critical and domineering father. These
roles coexist with his compassion for people. Neither parent role is
acceptable. He victimizes himself by suppressing all activity. He is a
crushing tyrant who will not allow his life to progress, cannot have
a lover or a wife, cannot enjoy his work, will not seek out
adventure. He is unable to shed his baby fat and wallows in self-
imposed misery.
He victimizes others by imposing his views upon them. Like his
father, he criticizes, demands, and gives unsolicited advice. His
friends try to make him understand how he sounds but he cannot
hear them. The identication is still too powerful. So they put up
with his miserable intrusiveness because they love the generous,
compassionate, and self-sacricing Nick who is one of the last of the
really true friends.
Don’t overlook that he is doing this to himself and deriving
unconscious pleasure from his actions. Behaving sadistically toward
himself re-creates the bond with his narcissistic father. Letting go of
the sadomasochistic option would mean releasing his father’s hand.
All this is being challenged in therapy. Nick is making slow
progress, fanning the spark of his original self. He takes two steps
forward and one back, punishing himself for every step toward
autonomy with depression and despair, since growth represents
disloyalty to his hated and loved father. He speaks as if he hates his
father, and in many ways he does. Nevertheless, a childish wish for
parental love keeps Nick emotionally attached. In therapy Nick feels
that he is making no progress at all, but this is not true. It is only
that life is going by at such a great pace and his steps are so very
small. Still, his overall apathy and numbness have been converted
into a recognizable depression. He knows that he lacks and that he
needs. The depression will lift when he begins to try to meet these
needs.
10
THE CHILD OF A NARCISSIST WHO BECOMES A
NARCISSIST: ALAN
In my meeting with Alan, our
narcissistic problems interacted. A child of a narcissist is frequently
wed to the notion that he or she must be right and the other wrong.
That is how his parents acted, often putting him down and
disregarding him. To the extent that he becomes fully narcissistic,
he resembles them and they adulate his show of superiority. Fearing
their interference, he develops the same defenses as they have,
which include being unable to accept views that dier from his
own. If someone does not readily defer to him, the child of a
narcissist can get quite hot under the collar. When his viewpoint is
challenged, it is an enormous blow and insult to his ego.
If, like Alan, he is very intelligent and well read, he buttresses
what he says with scholarly references, appearing to be in the know.
He has diering views and acts “right” to the other’s “wrong.” Here
it concerned being the child of narcissistic parents, a topic to which
this interviewer has given considerable thought. As the child of a
narcissist, I am easily raised to ire by contact with a person who acts
my superior and will not listen. Alan’s treatment plummeted me
back into my submissive and inferior position with my father.
This struggle, his and mine, was a combination of arrogance and
hurt feelings. Each wanted to be heard and to be thought correct by
the other. I was impressed by his endless references and allusions,
perhaps overly so since I was raised to worship “gray matter.” I am
interested in hearing contradictory views as long as the other person
does not disregard what I think. Alan chose to be the center of
sound, an outpouring of words that brooked no interruption. But I
did not want to defer to his need to be boss. I was upset by his
attitude of self-important arrogance, having been too often undercut
intellectually as a child to be able to observe what he did from a
point of neutrality. He clung to his image of superior understanding
and I demanded parity. The war was on.
Children of narcissists pick up their share of arrogance. We may
not be fully narcissistic or we may. It is to our benet to track down
our narcissism and get rid of it. Without narcissism, we can be
closer to other people, learn more, and suer less.
I arrived for the interview in an articially buoyed-up mood. My
fear argued with the positive experiences I had been having with all
the other participants. I clung to the shaky assumption that
everything would go ne despite a plethora of evidence to the
contrary.
I had known Alan casually for a couple of years and emerged
from most of our conversations feeling intellectually inadequate. He
induced this with a constant string of scholarly references followed
by the question, “Have you read …?” which I hadn’t.
Then he would go on and lose me. What was he talking about?
His thinking was crammed with information tangential to the point,
philosophical and literary asides, name-dropping of specialized
social movements. He was a master of quantity and speed. He talked
me deaf and dumb, lling the silent spaces I needed to breathe or
think. The distribution of talking and listening time was totally
inequitable.
He would use the few points I feebly managed to splutter out as a
jumping-o point for an ever greater torrent of words. He used
words and ideas to hide himself. He would dominate our
conversation with his own ow of speech. Quantity, obscurity,
tangential thinking, interpolated subthemes, any and every trick to
confuse and lose the listener. He didn’t want you to get too near him
and didn’t want to be understood.
This was the man I was coming to interview, hoping by dint of my
oce as interviewer to maintain control over the situation. Little
wonder I felt a degree of trepidation.
Nevertheless, it was not my rst interview and I had an idea of
what I needed to know, having already found amazingly repetitive
patterns in many children of narcissists. These patterns included
such problems as paralyzing self-doubt, confusion about one’s
identity and goals, and oversensitivity to the opinions of others.
Most of the participants in the study felt they gained insight from
our talking together.
When I came in, Alan and I embraced as near-friends. I was
introduced to the baby-sitter, who was about to take his little boy
out for the afternoon. The child had large dark eyes and a gentle
manner. Noticing my amber necklace, he said, “Mommy has one just
like it.” Very observant child.
After a brief house tour, Alan invited me to have a bite to eat with
him and we peered into an almost empty refrigerator. There was
hardly anything to eat, in the interest of controlling his tendency to
binge. I found a cold baked potato in tinfoil and he had something
congealing unattractively on a plate. With the crumbs and remnants
of our impoverished lunch before us, we sat down to discuss the
topic of narcissism.
But rst, he wanted to say something about his son. He spoke in
hushed tones of reverence. “He is extremely bright.” Immediately, I
felt a wave of depression. He repeated this several times, giving
various examples of his child’s brightness, including fathoming
events that he and his wife were trying to keep hidden. Or at least
he thought the child had. This measure of intelligence was tested by
using an indirect method of questioning, to be met by the child’s
indirect method of response. The level of his child’s understanding
was assessed through inference. I wondered if the father’s interest
was in whether they had protected the child from hurtful
information or, more important to them, whether their child was
smart enough to gure it out.
It was not the child’s brightness that depressed me. It was Dad’s
obsession with it. How he needed his child to be brilliant. I knew
this “intelligence sickness” from my own childhood. In the blindness
of repetition, Alan seemed unaware of spreading the contagion and
later asserted that he had freed himself of his parents’ demands to
be their genius. Now, it would appear, the demands came from
within and caused him to lower his child into the same quicksand.
My depression was talking to Alan in my head. It screamed things
like: “Don’t pass on the tortured suering; leave o with
expectations and evaluations. Set no conditions for acceptance and
don’t hold your breath every time he opens his mouth, hoping that
what emerges will be exceptional and fearing that it will be
ordinary. He senses what you are feeling. Even the adorable smile
on his face may be an attempt to please.” Of course, I said nothing.
I said nothing because I wanted Alan to present himself in a
natural way; I didn’t want to undermine the interview before its
completion. There was already sucient trouble between us. I
probably said little or nothing because he overwhelmed me with his
narcissistic guise of superiority, so similar to that of my father. I
knew that if I commented about his narcissistic treatment of his
child it would hurt him but not get through his blind spot and
defenses.
The psychological blind spot is interesting territory. If the blind
spot is yours, you cannot see through it and you cannot see it. You
can deduce your own blind spots through indirect evidence but you
have to be motivated to look for them. Since his disease tells the
narcissist that he is perfect, his blind spot is the largest of all.
Alan spoke of his child’s artistic talent and how he would draw
for hours. I felt his child being weighed for units of specialness.
Later, speaking of his own childhood, he said that he was the family
artist and “genius” who also “spontaneously” drew for long periods.
His parents kvelled (Yiddish for burst with pride) and displayed his
work. Alan now knows that his narcissistic father needed him to
replace the father’s dead brother, a man whose paintings covered
the walls of Alan’s childhood home. It was only later in the
interview that I heard Alan’s resentment at being used to replace a
dead family member. Before he expressed his feelings about being
used, Alan had to maintain his assigned role as stand-in
artist/genius. Rembrandt was his chosen hero. Alan imagined his
own greatness taking a similar vein.
Alan gave further background. His parents came from Europe as
“greenhorns.” His father needed to resurrect through unconscious
implantation the identities of two of his brothers and Alan was the
chosen recipient. The rst was an artist and the second a man who
suered a great deal and died young. Alan was to develop a talent
for suering.
I know the personal truth of this. Alan is the kind of person you
never want to greet with the customary “How are you?” since Alan
will tell you. He cannot resist the opportunity to cry on your
shoulder, which would be less annoying if he gave equal time to
your problems. But then most people would rarely want to speak
that long. Alan will hear them out, give a considered response, and
then it is his turn.
His ability to resonate with, step up to, and feel universal pain is a
benet he uses in his craft (he is an artist and writer), depicting the
terrors and suerings of other people. He does this in visual art and
words. His writing arouses one to tears for world tragedy. He has
taken the voices of minorities who never knew they had a history
and brought them into our awareness. He has presented the
experience of the war-torn. But in his personal life, intense self-
involvement undercuts his sensitivity to others. He demands
sympathy and interest without awareness of the other’s unstated
response to him. He wants to see sympathy for him in your eyes and
tends not to notice your boredom, exhaustion, desire to speak, your
resentment at being turned solely into a listener. His demandingness
may allow the unconscious release of hostility stored when his
father treated him the same way and made him into an unwilling
audience.
By choosing “morally correct” topics to speak about, he can be a
wolf in sheep’s clothing. “Morally correct” topics show him to be a
humanist and sympathizer with the underdog. Alan actually feels
this way but the way he speaks also carries the implicit message: I
will suer and you must support my personal value by listening. He
runs with the ball of compassion, demanding indulgence to prove
what a great person he is for feeling so much.
I returned from such musings to the interview and started to pose
a question. Alan cut me o. He had already prepared some material
showing his views of narcissism and of his narcissistic parents. He is
prone to cutting o the speaker.
He started by telling a dream. I will give it here in an
uninterrupted rendition, although the telling was broken up by
innumerable digressions, and very nearly did not get told at all by
dint of our growing and unmanageable argument over the way he
spoke. He was drawing me along confusedly in his wake.
“I was standing in a crowded public square in an Italian town and
spotted my mother in the distance. I turned my back and ascended a
few steps so that I could get a better view. When she came up to me,
she was very upset and accused me of turning my back to hurt her
in rejection. I attempted to explain that I didn’t mean to hurt her
feelings, that I was only trying to get a perspective.”
This dream shows Alan grappling with his hypersensitive and
intrusive mother. He is attempting to get above her and out of her
invasive clutches. This dream explains our interaction with each
other. I too am an “invasive mommy” with my questions.
Alan told me about his mother. She was ambitious but
educationally deprived, raised in a large and poor family that
couldn’t aord to keep her in school. She was proud of her son’s
artistic and academic achievements and wanted him to succeed but
she didn’t want him to be autonomous. He remembers her envy as
he went o to his scholarship classes, while she watched from the
window as he left. He felt guilty that he was relieved to be free of
her.
It is and was her need to get through to him, to live inside him,
that is disturbing. Both parents are suciently narcissistic to remain
xed in their defensive demands. He is currently less troubled by his
father’s narcissistic need to shape his personality. The damage has
already been done and Alan is inured. Alan’s radar is not set o by
his father’s distant posturing. His own regal mode keeps the proper
distance. His mother’s need to get inside him is less easily warded
o.
Alan started to explain his parents’ narcissism by placing it in a
historical context. Jews living in the Polish-Russian shtetls had to
learn to live as a symbiotic unit because they were surrounded by
hostile anti-Semitic peasants. The pattern of symbiosis entered the
Jewish culture and was subsequently exported to America.
Alan experienced this symbiosis in the second generation. He was
tied to his family of greenhorns, people who were ashamed of
themselves and lived through his achievements. He took his brown-
bag lunch to the Ivy League campus where he was attending classes
on a scholarship. He took with him as well their feelings of
“nonbelonging” and inadequacy.
I felt the need to make a comment, to widen the understanding of
narcissism. I was reacting to what sounded like a rationalization, an
explanation that covered up individual motivation and
responsibility. I said, “Shtetl life is not the only thing that produces
narcissism and symbiosis is not its only characteristic.” In nature,
symbiotes are mutually helpful. Narcissism is closer to parasitism.
Symbiosis lets us use each other, as we are two entities with
mutually useful needs and wants. We are rather interdependent.
Narcissism allows me to use you as if I exist in singular perfection
and you are there to serve me. A narcissist feeds on his children but
his children do not receive reciprocal benet.
I said that narcissistic parents wound their children by not loving
them and that a lack of love was not culturally ordained by the
symbiosis of ghetto life. As an example of nonshtetl narcissism, I
spoke of Victoria, also discussed in this book. She is the child of
upper-middle-class WASPs, members of the dominant culture. Her
narcissistic mother hated her, but not because her mother was
eeing from her own societal enemies.
I was shocked when I received the rst wave of Alan’s fury. I had
contradicted him! I was disputing his knowledge of Jewish history.
He started citing sociological texts and asking me if I had read them.
He announced that until I did, I was in no position to conduct my
study. He was trying to put me out of business.
My mind began to lose its focus, my usual response under such
attack, a habitual response to my narcissistic father’s invalidation of
my thinking. I was no longer clear on what I needed to ask him. The
only thing I held on to was my need to have the dream completed. I
tried to change the subject by asking him to nish it. I would put
the pieces of the puzzle together later.
This set o another tirade. He wasn’t about to give me his dream.
His tirade wasn’t over. I wasn’t getting o that easy. He got angry,
very angry, the words ying out of his mouth. He went on and on
about how I was invalidating his knowledge. He had my back to the
wall. I held on to my opinion (what else could I do?), although I
told him that I would consider his at my leisure. He continued to
re the big guns and I now wonder why he was so threatened.
The back-and-forth between us only led to greater obstinate fury
on his part. I feared that the point would be reached where he
would refuse to go on unless I apologized for my own opinion and
agreed with him one hundred percent. This I could not do. I was
experiencing the same feelings of invalidation I had as a small child
when my narcissistic father took umbrage over some imagined
slight and cancelled me out.
I told him that I felt he was trying to force an agreement from me
when we had simply disagreed. He didn’t see it like that and now he
felt dismissed. I chided him like an exasperated parent, which is
how I felt: “Can’t we just get on with it?” I was trapped in his child’s
tantrum. This too annoyed him. He needed to call the shots, not I.
He would tell me when we could proceed. I was getting angrier.
Alan was into his pain and he would not let it go. In our
interchange, both of us had the rage of a child with rejecting
parents. In Alan’s adamant historical perspective, he avoided
blaming his father’s narcissism for undermining his shaky ego.
Frankly, I do not know how we resolved this. The storm just
passed, perhaps due to some minor stirring of guilt on his part.
From my perspective, his explanation of the shtetl origin of
narcissism was important to him because of his pride in his
knowledge of Jewish history and his ability to do a historical-
psychological analysis, wedded to narcissistic hypersensitivity over
any implication that his thinking was not awless. Additionally, the
shtetl explanation, by focusing on symbiosis, lessened his awareness
of the destructiveness of his father’s narcissism. Having joined his
father in like defense, it is safer to leave it alone. Symbiosis was the
primary hurtful characteristic of Alan’s mother.
Symbiosis does not a narcissist make. The true narcissist lives in
grandiose isolation and manipulates rather than experience his
dependency on other people, as does Alan’s father, as does Alan
himself. Symbiosis is an easy target which allows Alan to dodge
guilt by association as he walks in his father’s footprints.
He had some kind of breakdown as a young man running after his
parents’ acceptance and afterward vowed “not to need to please
anybody through my achievements.” He would be content within
himself, utterly self-contained and self-satised through his artistic
output. This is why his mother’s attempts to penetrate his shield of
grandiosity, to be close to him and share his glory, are
unacceptable.
Alan had had some therapy but the surface was barely scratched
when his therapist died. Narcissists can be in therapy many years
before they change, before they can listen to a contradictory
opinion. They may require endless hours of being listened to and of
receiving absolute support. The therapist must be perceived as
taking their side against an insensitive world. Only after years of
building trust will the narcissistic person admit to dependency on
the therapist and only then will a conicting viewpoint be
considered.
Nothing I said to Alan was absorbed or accepted. As far as my
interviewing techniques were concerned, it was a total rout. My
attempts to shape the interview were taken as an attack upon him,
his autonomy, thought patterns, the value of his essential being. We
both lost our tempers when I tried to force him to answer questions
and not to overwhelm me with words.
The clock said it was time to leave, although nothing had been
completed. We stood up in disarray and made one more attempt to
reach each other but the same subjectivity poisoned our
communication. Alan told me with annoyance that he had given up
valuable time to see me that he needed for his own work. He said
that he had always felt the tension between us and was trying to
make it better. I felt guilty but thought, “My time is also valuable
and much of it was wasted listening to your defensive perorations.”
I saw in him my utterly inaccessible narcissistic father, who is
never wrong. And he saw in me his overly sensitive, intrusive
mother pursuing him up the steps. My assertiveness and insistence
on having my own place in our interview were regarded as
intrusive. This is to be expected of a narcissist. As the child of a
brains-oriented narcissist, I was hypersensitive to his overtalking
and position of superiority and responded very negatively to the
mistreatment of not being listened to.
We had run out of time. I had to go. On the way to the door, Alan
spoke ruefully, in the tone of suering sainthood. “What goes wrong
between us?” I was annoyed at his tone and still holding on to the
illusion that truth could help. I said, “It’s because you’re too long-
winded for me.”
Another are-up. What a fool I was. His eyes were lled with re,
his eyebrows raised in contempt. “People tell me that,” he said, “but
I am a man of passion.” His implication was that they are all wrong.
“I am a deeply related person. I care about issues.” “Deeply related
to your own self,” I thought.
I felt totally defeated by myself and by him. Alan went on and on.
He had no concept of time. Desperate to end on a conciliatory note,
I apologized and said that I was hypersensitive to verbosity because
my family had abused my listening. I asked him to consider it as my
shortcoming, a suciently neutral and self-abnegating statement
that he could hear. He said, “Next time, please let me know when I
have exceeded your limit.” This was a better ending. We were not
parting as enemies.
We hugged good-bye sadly outside, standing in front of my car.
Truly exhausting.
I emerged from this interview shaken, angry, and confused, guilty
about my contribution to the anger between us, my own lack of
exibility, and hypersensitivity. We each had stepped on the other’s
narcissistic toes. I wondered what the people who knew us would
think if they heard our interchange. As for myself, a good deal of
time had been spent learning very little. I regarded the meeting as a
total loss.
I was so discouraged that I was ready to scrap the whole thing
when I realized that the problems of our interaction said a lot about
our narcissism.
This was the rst person I had interviewed whose narcissism was
so great as to require total protection from a foreign idea or voice.
His narcissism had been somewhat rearranged and concealed by a
facade of therapized rationalization. But it still was classic. Our
exaggerated conicts expressed many narcissistic problems. As
Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.”
11
ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOR IN CHILDREN OF NARCISSISTS:
MARIE, FAT IS DEAD—OBESITY AS A PROTECTIVE DEVICE
Children of narcissists are subjected to
parental abuse that they come to associate with love. The parent
attacks not only what they do but who they are. Hearing not “That
is wrong,” but “You are stupid” aects their sense of self. As a
result, the child needs to hide who he is and develops defenses
toward that end.
Fat can serve this purpose. A parent can attack you for being fat,
which is glaring and obvious. Behind this defense you can hide your
talent, dreams, and wishes, the things that are uniquely you. Your
parent is distracted by the fat and doesn’t reach for deeper places
within you that you want to keep untouched. You also stay fat
because you want your parent’s love and fear his or her displeasure
at your having an independent life. Obesity often makes a person
unpopular with the opposite sex. Eating is a permissible pleasure
that can get out of hand since it comforts you and removes your
attention from troubled thoughts. Overeating is a problem for
several of the people in this book. For Nick, Marie, Alan, and
Victoria, it has led to obesity. Obesity is commonly dened as being
about 10 percent above the average weight for your height and
build. Obesity is often associated with reduced physical activity,
fatigue, and ultimately with damaged health. For Marie, weight
change is periodic.
People often speak of dieting without recognizing that fat is but a
surface symptom. You can take o the fat but if you leave the
problems that fester underneath, it will come back. Or instead of fat
you will develop another defense that expresses the same problems
and equally covers your interior. If you still need to ee your
problems, you may turn to such escapes as drugs or compulsive
overwork. If you want to appear bigger than you are and have a
child’s view of adulthood, you may develop a loud voice and
imperious manner. If you want to conceal your sexuality, you may
dress in a fashion that declares you neuter, etc.
Of course, some infants are raised to overeat and thereby develop
extra fat cells at an early age that later predispose them to being
overweight. As adults, they more easily gain weight than other
people at the same caloric level. However, with an exercise program
and appropriate diet, it is hard to remain overweight.
After years of therapy, Marie still disowns what drives her to eat.
She knows she dislikes herself but attributes that to the action of an
outside agent. Fatness keeps her single and postpones a sensual life.
We must own our self-hatred if we are to deal with it. To love
ourselves and seek outside love is a mighty struggle. If we avoid this
undertaking, we will have only the limited love of our narcissistic
parents.
Marie is a unique being. From the outset, she wanted to help and
was open and willing to expose the problems of being the child of a
narcissist. On our rst call, I was struck by something in her voice, a
certain tone. Although her message was hearty, I thought I heard an
undercurrent of fear. I wondered if she knew of this and looked
forward to our talk.
The woman who greets me is very fat, 212 pounds at 5’1”. She is
large in every dimension, like a full, ripe fruit, and not unattractive.
She laughs easily and is full of energy. Her alert expression radiates
intelligence. She tells me that she was not always full of life and
raring to go. Therapy is restoring the “happy kid” she was before
being caught in the vise of her mother’s narcissism.
Marie grew up in Bulgaria, a country racked by insurrection,
where her father was a peripatetic engineer who worked in far-o
places and was largely absent during her rst ve years. She and her
mother lived in a city far from the sites of insurrection. Mother
frequently joined him, leaving Marie in the countryside with her
doting maternal grandparents and uncle. She was only eight months
old the rst time mother dropped her o with her grandparents. The
visit was only supposed to last the weekend, but extended into an
incredible six months.
Her mother’s needs did not center around the infant and her later
“weekends” often extended to a second week. A base party to
attend, a missed bus, and it was midweek, not worth coming home
for a day or two before returning. Marie was happy with her
grandparents, who were her caretakers. Later this relationship gave
her distance from a mother who wanted total control and would
withdraw emotional support to enforce her will. Marie could resist
since her support lay elsewhere.
Her grandparents cared for her when her mother could not handle
the child’s illnesses or did not wish to. Mother was panicked by
every city health scare and within hours, Marie was packed and
standing at the corner waiting for a taxi to take her to them. She
never knew where she would lay her head that night and which
school she would attend in the morning. There was little security.
Her grandfather was an Orthodox priest who would come home
from a wedding or christening, pockets stued with sugared
almonds. He would freeze in the doorway and Marie would throw
herself on him to search his pockets. She was utterly indulged by
him and her uncle, who also loved to play. Her greatest losses were
when her uncle left to be married and her grandfather died.
She was so much their favorite that during adolescence, when she
and a cousin visited in their miniskirts (Marie was thin at the time),
the cousin had to sit with a towel covering her thighs while Marie
was accepted as she was. “With them, I could do no wrong.” They
helped Marie to develop her self but she always feared that what
she had could be taken away. An example of this was in her
grandparents’ encouraging her to sing and dance. At the age of three
and a half, she was an uninhibited little performer. When her
mother heard her lovely voice, she got Marie booked on the local
radio station.
Marie did not know of her right to say no and went to the station
in a state of terror. She heard her mother’s boastful introduction and
then was “on,” another lesson in surrendering her will. Lack of
control is normal for a three-year-old but this became her attitude
for life. She was the property of her mother, a woman who could
dispose of her child’s mind and body.
And criticize. It started with her body. First she was “too thin”
and dosed with cod liver oil, shots, and vitamins to fatten her up.
Then she overshot the mark and became “too fat,” to be put on an
endless series of diets. She was the wrong height and wrong weight.
When the body is labeled inadequate, the self feels analogously
diminished. Even though Marie is forty-one, her mother still asks
her if she has grown taller to oset her rotundity.
She fought back and would not kowtow. The self her
grandparents had nurtured was more than her mother had
bargained for. It responded even when she was terried. She
challenged her mother’s statements. Her mother would call her fat
and she would answer cockily, “You’re not so slim yourself.” Her
mother would call her friendless and Marie would ask, “So where
are your friends?” which was met with a slap in the face. Marie
fended o criticisms and believed them, every one. She was fat—
and relatively friendless.
The latter problem arose from being three years younger than her
classmates. Her ambitious mother entered her into the rst grade a
year early by changing the year of her birth. Since the month of
Marie’s birthday fell right before the cut-o date, she was
immediately ahead by two years and when she skipped a grade, by
three. In the sixth grade, she was nine among twelve-year-olds,
mentally precocious but emotionally and physically immature. The
other children felt it and cut her out of their social activities. Marie
suered a great deal from loneliness and struck up a friendship with
a girl three grades down. This was brought to the attention of the
guidance counselor, who was concerned that Marie seemed to be
socially retarded and sent for her mother. Not only did her mother
not reveal her child’s true age, but later bawled her out for playing
with a younger child!
Her mother saw no mistake or hardship in forcing Marie to get
along with children who were more mature. Narcissists do not make
mistakes. There was something wrong with Marie for not being able
to do so. Marie had to go along with a denial of her real age and of
the propriety of her emotional needs.
Her father reentered the household when she was ve. He was
puritanical and shunned overt physicality. The only place for
embracing was at the airport when saying farewell. If Marie threw
herself on him at the wrong time (probably a carryover from her life
with her grandparents), he would say, “You’re mushy,” get up, and
leave the room. She would be rewarded by his company if she was a
“pure head” and sexless know-it-all. Marie was into endless reading
and pursuit of every fact. She was determined to know it all.
Her father took teenage Marie to a movie. When he caught sight
of some sex in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, he walked out and she
remained. Later, he told her, “I would have thought better of you.”
Her interest in sexuality was condemned by him as wrong. This was
not what she had felt with her grandparents.
To adapt, she denied her body by getting fatter. Her possum act
was “Fat is dead.” Strong sensual feelings, condoned by her
grandparents and owing beneath the surface, would not be
suspected by her father, who condemned them, or by her mother,
who thought her daughter’s sexuality competitive. Marie was very
much alive and her gross body was a ruse that made her seem
maternal, asexual, and safe. She felt superior in her self-abnegation.
Her father preferred this brainy daughter to his eshy, sensual, and
emotional wife, who didn’t read. Her mother preferred this know-it-
all daughter to her demanding younger children. Marie was on a
family pedestal as goddess of intellect and substitute mother with
younger siblings. As her family’s intellectual totem, she was praised
as compensation for being suppressed and used. Her feelings
rebelled against this and when she looked within, her feelings called
her a dismal failure.
Her shape and eating habits were public property. She was not in
charge, a common experience for one who becomes obese. Others
must control this person’s eating because she lacks the strength and
will never acquire discipline. Marie said, “my body felt humiliated.”
Wrongness was painted on by her mother’s disgust. Her self watched
from a distance, a split reinforced by violence. Mother hit her
around the face and head, slapped and beat her. She lived in
constant fear of attack. Fat was a lightning rod for her mother’s
rage. She had “a lot of pain around the heart” which her detached
head did not understand.
Shifting back and forth between her grandparents and her mother
gave her two dierent self-images. Her grandparents found her
absolutely perfect. They were physically demonstrative, encouraged
play, sensual enjoyment, and pleasure. Her mother opposed this. If
there was an argument with her mother and her mother’s thinking
was found to be incorrect, Mother would switch sides and say that
Marie’s view had been the wrong one. Such “crazy-making” (Marie’s
expression) pried her loose from reality. It was hard to know who
had said what. Crazy-making was there when her mother asked
questions without listening to the answers. Marie took this as
evidence of her own inadequacy.
Her life was lled with surrender and resistance. She had stopped
singing and dancing. “Singing was the most dicult thing for me to
do.” She was an intellectual who read any book whose title was
mentioned, too insecure not to know what another person knew.
Her quest for education brought her to graduate school in the
United States, and the fatness that concealed her came along. Once
here, she started dropping weight at an amazing rate and came
down to 132 pounds, size six. Being “large-boned,” she was thin.
She felt that being thin brought public notice to her sexual
availability. She was declaring her womanhood.
But her unconscious mind needed to win her mother’s love, so the
man she chose to be with was narcissistic. He needed someone to
live through and hobble down. As soon as they met, she started
losing ground. Her feelings must have been in a state of alarm but
the child of a narcissist does not properly read inner signals and an
obese person is even less in touch. When he asked for a date, the
talking head said, “Why not?” There was no logical reason not to.
After they dated for a while, he asked her to live with him. “Why
not,” she thought and they did. When he said that they should
marry, she said, “Why not” and never felt a thing.
Her husband was not only narcissistic but was like her father in
that he suppressed erotic expression. At a party, he would allot
himself one dance as “enough.” Sex happened once a month. Her
sensuality was controlled. A year after marriage, she was over three
hundred pounds. Eating covered agony. She was back in hiding,
again anesthetized and compliant. Her husband did not mind his
wife’s overweight, which represented the security of her shackles.
They had children, and she gave herself to mothering. Her children
had enough attention and a decade went by. Marie was established
in her career as a teacher and the children were doing well. She got
into therapy and saw the importance of her grandparents, who had
kept her from madness. It had been easier to forget them and adapt
to misery by assuming that everyone’s mother was like her own. Her
grandparents’ love became a standard of light against which she
could measure her parents’ darkness.
Marie hated being captive to marriage and began to chafe at its
constraints. She was ready for divorce despite her husband’s
unhappiness over the loss of one who had provided for his needs for
years. Even her friends had become his. Not wanting to hurt him,
she waited until he found a lady friend so that he could let go of her
more easily. Then she was alone.
Although she lives a continent away, there is still the telephone
and her mother’s opinion. Of course her mother called her a failure
for divorcing. Marie feels increasingly disconnected from her
mother, who is “getting smaller and smaller.” She thinks that her
mother, who is in her late seventies, is withdrawing in the
detachment of age and not needing Marie as much as she used to.
She mentions how her sister provides endless caring and is so afraid
of Mother’s death that she keeps her mother dressed in childish
pink. The sister, who is younger than Marie, has no outside sexual
love relations. Her life is devoted to the architectural profession in
which her mother takes pride, and then to Mother herself.
Mother is not suering from any particular illness except a
general wearing down. Still, I think that Marie’s opinion about her
mother’s lack of need is wrong, although it may not be turned to
Marie. Narcissists do not change much with the years except to get
depressed if their vanity is not supported. “It looks as if your mother
is using your sister the way she once used you.”
Marie says that she is not out of the picture. She helps her mother
deal with issues that her sister cannot face, information that will
make it easier for Mother to die. Her sister dresses their mother in
pink and tries to deny the inevitable. I ask if Marie feels that her
mother appreciates her eorts. “Oh, no. Mother metabolizes the
information and then comes back for more.”
She says that she is able to let her mother pass away. But it feels
to me as if she is jumping over work that still needs to be done.
Obese people often use denial, like eating, to deny inner pain. Marie
may be relatively free of her outer mother, but what of the inner?
“Why are you still overweight?” She becomes quiet, then answers,
“It is an area of conict,” and “I am still full of self-hate.” “Men nd
me attractive but I am unable to take the message in.” She holds on
to her mother’s view of her body and self, to her father’s opinion
about not showing sexuality to men, who will think her “too much”
in passion, energy, and sensuality. She says she knows that her body
has “a certain sweetness about it” but mutes its signal. No sexual
signs from her unless the man declares his interest. Fatness is her
disguise.
“Why do you hold on to these negative ideas?” I am amazed at
the tenacity of suering. After a pause she says, “Sometimes when I
meditate, negative ideas come to me from the outside, as if they had
a life of their own.” She cites a book by a Cypriot mystic who felt
that if you hold on to an introject for a long time, it starts to exist
outside of you and to have power. The writer claims to see his
introject as a kind of cloud. With this mystical explanation, Marie
rejects the necessity for confronting herself. She avoids seeing that
she clings to a way of life that shields her from taking responsibility
for the attacks of and rejection by her negative inner parent.
I argue against the external existence of this introject with its own
power. I say that we are the source of its power and that we can be
mired in self-hatred if we don’t take responsibility for the contents
of our mind. Once Marie anesthetized herself to her emotional pain
by acting on the basis of logic alone. Then she thought to diminish
further attack by adding the cover of fat. But the negative introject
was already in residence.
Although the negative introject feels foreign to all of us, we can
eliminate it by admitting to and understanding its presence. To give
it a life outside of ourselves is to court madness. Then we feel
possessed and in need of exorcism. We do not see our need for
control of the attacking thought as an internal ght. I speak of this
to Marie and she says that she fears to be her “higher self,” and “on
my own.” “I am ashamed of that.” The child of a narcissist is raised
to feel guilty for desiring independence. Fat connects her with her
mother. Living her mother’s recipe for failure makes her mother
correct: “You are ungainly, and sexually unpopular.” A fat,
humiliated person shrinks out of sight. Fat is like an armored car,
battened against attack. Fat is like a weight that pulls her down.
Why the tone of fear in her voice? She lives in fear of rejection for
being a full person. I believe that Marie will divest herself of the
harsh inner parent only by attaining normal weight. I think this
because being slim is her statement of freedom. When we live the
defensive life, our energy is tied up in defensive structures and we
cannot know the self. To know who we are we need to come out
from behind the barricade and enter the light.
Therapy can help Marie do this, but she has already been in
therapy for years. Intellectual understanding needs to be lived to
become a part of our sense of self. As long as she remains obese, she
can believe that if she assumes her proper weight it would drive
men away as once it did her dad. As it was with Mom, she can
believe that all love depends on sacrice. Weight protects her from
having an experience of what life could oer if she were to accept
herself.
12
RAISING A CHILD TO FULFILL THE NARCISSISTIC PARENT’S
HEROIC IMAGE: MARK, UNABLE TO RESPOND TO HIS
CHILD’S DEPENDENCY NEEDS, REQUIRES THE CHILD TO BE
HEROIC
Mark’s narcissistic and controlling
mother arrested the development of his psychological strength. He
battled but usually ended in submission to her injured state of mind.
In their household his mother had her way. She issued the law,
which her husband and son followed. Mark’s father was distant and
submissive, a man who oered a poor model of assertiveness. His
hobby was cooking. He hid behind the pots while his wife set the
scene.
Mark was distracted by his mother’s intrusiveness and accepted
her doubtful view of him to the point where his self-esteem was
undermined. He wanted to please her and still be free, contradictory
motivations that subverted his concentration. His school record was
doubtful and he was unsure if there was any possibility of academic
success.
Instead of facing his fears and doubts, he adopted the “manly”
skills of running, hiking, and camping and became an Eagle Scout.
Lanky, tall, and powerful, this man of muscle swam like a sh, went
scuba diving, canoed, went camping, and could survive most natural
things. However, his mother’s narcissistic machinations were not
natural.
To quell self-doubt, Mark does things that other people would nd
extremely dicult, like swimming in an icy lake while others watch;
like camping in a snowbound tent in which he stows the ax brought
to chop rewood. In his ordinary life he rides a motorcycle through
the madness of a city. In all these heroic moments he asserts his
worth, and by acting carefree and self-condent he almost convinces
himself. If anyone were to ask Mark if he felt suciently manly and
he gave an honest answer, it would be no. Instead of facing his
feelings of inadequacy, he has become physically stronger and
functions only partially at developing a career.
He married a woman who would ride behind him on his
motorcycle, although in later years she declined. They had a child,
in large part because he needed to present a manly image by having
an ospring. What particularly aected the child was Mark’s need
that the child be extremely strong from birth. Mark thought that
such a need was delightful fun for his child and could not see his
true response. In this relationship, we see how narcissistic problems
are passed on.
Mark is a friend of mine from California, a former Eagle Scout who
does not pay attention to his young son Bruce’s vulnerability. Bruce
was in his second year when I visited them and saw Mark let his
child move toward an obvious accident in which he fell down part
of a ight of stairs. The boy had been standing halfway down the
stairs, to which his father paid no attention. He lost his balance and
tumbled to a hard landing, where he lay and did not emit a sound.
Mark walked over, picked Bruce up for a quick once-over, and
found nothing signicantly wrong. He seemed unable to respond
emotionally to his child’s feelings and to the child’s body. His
response was as to a machine, a human machine that he hadn’t kept
from personal injury. He held the child with insucient aection, as
if he were an object. Finding no bruises, he gave Bruce a pat of
reassurance, set him on his feet, and walked away.
There was not a word between them. I watched in horror as it
happened, noting that the fallen child barely whimpered. This was
not a childproof house and he was used to taking bruises in response
to his father’s need for a two-year-old Eagle Scout. Although a good-
natured person, Mark had a narrowness of perception that made
him unaware. He is partly narcissistic in that personal ambition
shapes his behavior and makes him unable to understand his child.
He is lled with compulsive needs that his child must ll, a
controlling approach not unlike the way his narcissistic mother
treated him. He does not think of his child’s feelings when his own
important wishes are concerned. Heroic needs rule his perceptions
and demands. The child’s injuries had but a moment of attention.
The child gets little emotional contact, as if he were a hamster
running in its cage. It is as if Mark feels there is no way to be at one
with his child.
When Bruce was about three, he and his parents visited me. Again
he seemed to be in constant danger. This time he nearly fell into a
nearby creek. He did not act like an ordinary child, who would have
tested before making his move. He was in constant motion, like an
outlet for the dynamic energy of a battery that is always on. He was
like a wild animal with drugged senses, on the run out of fear and
unable to test its surroundings.
Bruce did not heed our calls nor answer to his name. The way he
acted made me feel sad and frightened. I thought the child to be
seriously unreachable. His mother watched his dangerous
perambulations and took me aside to complain that her husband put
Bruce into dangerous situations and took insucient care. She said
that Mark scolded and disobeyed her when she asked him not to do
it. Despite her anxiety, Mark’s need and vision ruled the treatment
of their child. Although she said that she nagged Mark about this, I
found her willingness to accept a dangerous situation for her child a
peculiar kind of didence. Perhaps a driven man like Mark had
done well to marry a woman who looked at issues from afar. It kept
their point of conict from generating into open warfare.
That night, the child wandered aimlessly and frenetically from
room to room, unrelated to the grownups who were talking. He was
without rest but his parents did not try to put him to bed. It
disturbed me that we could not reach him. His parents found him
dicult but did not label him as emotionally out of contact. They
threatened jokingly to leave him asleep in his stroller, left parked in
my kitchen, so they could depart on the sly. I believe that his
mother had conceived the baby to please her husband and never
fully cottoned to a motherly role.
I could not get Bruce into my lap for a snuggle. One time, I
grabbed him as he went by, held on to nd him in a reaction sti
and distant. What happens to a child’s need for contact if his
deprivation is broken into only for a brief hug and then he is
returned to Nowhere Land? What happens if he is disregarded by
parents who remain out of touch and use him to fulll their
fantasies? Rather than having momentary respite from loneliness, it
is better to live like a tank at war. The pain of feeling on and o
again is more horrible than going without feeling and contact
altogether.
He did not respond to physical contact and a friendly voice. As
the night wore on, I eventually coaxed him out of his troubled
walking into a nap on the cushion that lay by my side. I patted it
and made soothing sounds to which he settled in. But he rested
without being touched and kept a frightened distance. This was not
a child who wanted to be held.
Two years later, when the child was ve, I saw the three of them
again. Bruce was like a wooden Indian who, at Mark’s command,
swung over his father’s arm like a top, arms xed at his side, face
and eyes inexpressive. I barely heard him speak although he later
played mechanically with the phone. Again, I grabbed him for a hug
when he would not talk and found his body unyielding as a nail. He
was without social contact, raised to be a “superman” by a father
who needed to see his own image reected in a tough, unfeeling
person. One day his child would be an Eagle Scout. But what would
be the child’s inner life?
A child wants to please his parents. If they are narcissistic and tell
him how to feel, he stops knowing his own feelings. A narcissistic
parent declares his child’s natural feelings wrong if they are in
disagreement with his own, if they fall short of the parent’s image,
are critical of the parent, or express a contrary notion. The
narcissistic parent wants to be beyond criticism, to be mirrored as a
god. The obedient child surrenders his own awareness.
This child disengages from his rejected feeling self. If his
narcissistic parent projects horrifying and unacceptable feelings onto
him, these are what he feels. If he is treated as unloving and
unlovable but able to show physical heroics, that is what he will be
and do. A love-hungry child goes dead inside, an enactment that
implies, “I am without love and tough as my parents need me to
be.” To please them, he is in accord with their need.
Of course, you cannot denitively predict the adult future of a
ve-year-old. I imagine that he will do many things to show how
tough he is. He will enjoy camping, swimming, skiing, the deeds his
father likes to share. I think he will not get close to people.
Closeness does not naturally develop late. Without help in getting to
know himself, probably from psychotherapy, he will go through life
at a distance, not wanting to know the horrors of his need for
aection, understanding, and the knowledge of an unmet self. If
feelings of his unlled need for love get through to him, he will feel
depression and possibly engage in self-destructive activity.
Childhood did not teach him that such needs can be met.
Psychotherapy would be in order.
13
CHANGING FROM WEAKNESS INTO STRENGTH: HOW TO
DEVELOP A REAL SENSE OF SELF
Children of narcissists can grow from
weakness into strength. In order to do so, we must know things
inside us that hold us back, and we must change them. The work of
change develops strengths that go well beyond the usual. “Usual”
means falling in line with the average norms of society. Life with a
narcissistic parent always means tting in with his or her schema.
Instead we need to nd our unique opinion. We need perseverance
to overcome the problem of self-unknowing. In this chapter we look
at our specic problems, ways to approach them, and the strengths
that we need to develop.
To change, we must know the biases that we hold against our
selves. What did our parents hate and love in us and how much did
these judgments dene our self-images? We may have learned our
parents’ values but our history is dicult to fathom since these anti-
self attitudes are ancient and appear in everything we do. We are
like bonsai plants with prior years of connements, suppression, and
reshaping. What is our natural shape? It takes years to uncover as
we revert by degrees to growing.
Take the following example of a learned error: A narcissistic
father had opera lessons in his youth. As a parent, he often broke
into stentorian measures of an opera, his favorite being “La Donna e
mobile” (Woman is ckle), whose words expressed mistrust of the
faithfulness of women everywhere. From her earliest years, he
nagged his daughter about being out of tune. He would encourage
her to sing a few notes and then would commence with the
evaluation. He spoke in tones full of scorn and amazement, sang his
correction, and jeeringly provoked her to continue. She stopped
singing and retreated into humiliated silence. Had she been out of
tune? Probably. Attacked as she was, her incapacity was
permanently instilled.
She accepted the diagnosis of being incapable of carrying a tune
and lost contact with her voice. She was a stranger to what came
out of her mouth. She could hear another person’s singing pitch and
could tell the dierence between notes that were closely spaced, but
when she had to sing, she couldn’t, not even “Happy birthday to
you.” Her throat did not respond to her ears. Perhaps she did not
hear herself because embarrassment was with her and always ran
the show.
Singing in tune came of itself after years of psychotherapy with a
therapist who had perfect pitch and could test her. She had not
worked on singing, but with better knowledge of what she thought
and felt she began to control her singing notes. Without a critical
listener to mock what she produced, her attention was less divided.
She was not so easily dissuaded from her perceptions and regained
her voice as a sign of self-knowledge. Being disunited from self is a
problem for the child of a narcissist. I wonder how many cannot
sing in tune.
It helps to know how you feel about your life. Although self-
blame makes us blind, if we ask ourselves what happened to us in
childhood and from this who we really are, images will come. Some
of them are painful but less painful than living an unrecognized
image, a fate predicted and thus determined by the parent.
You can listen to your inner self by allowing a fantasy that tells
you what once was. I remember being inducted into a past-life
regression by a woman who did such work as I lay on the oor and
followed instructions. I have no belief in past life but had the
fantasy of being a desert slave who slept on a bed of corn husks
stacked in a slatted bin. I was a slave in both sexes for three
generations, always sleeping in that bin and increasingly disgusted
till I walked into the starry desert night to escape. I walked so far
that the settlement became a whispering of lights on the horizon but
I found nothing to walk to. Rather than die out there alone I walked
back.
This was not a past life experience. It was a metaphor for my life
experience with narcissistic parents, slaving for the smallest bits of
approval.
Some children of narcissists act as badly as their parents say they
do, and even if they do something well, these children focus on all
evidence that might support their parents’ negative view. Although
my secret desire was to become a dancer, I was described by my
narcissistic parent as a klutz and never dared ask for lessons.
Klutz I was when I served ice cream to my narcissistic parent’s
girlfriend and to her friend Sabine, a visitor from Michigan. I
decided to balance the dish of ice cream on top of her head and
somehow spilled it on her dress. It was horrible, wiping ice cream
o and feeling utterly clumsy as my father’s hateful comments
echoed round. My error proved him right. Better for me to hide.
Did you learn self-hatred? What negatives were laid upon you
that entered into your self-image? Do you have self-condemnatory
physical, mental, spiritual views? Are the views based on something
real or were they told and retold until you believed them? Do you
believe things about yourself that no one has seen, but you cannot
be dissuaded? Do you feel yourself to be in an objectionable state?
Shaped by the forced absorption of our parent’s opinion, we are
like hungry frogs whose tongues dart out for the passing y. Unlike
a frog, we will eat poisonous ies, poisonous comments that make
us feel great or inadequate, distorting messages that reject us as we
are. We feel so unacceptable that if something bad is said about us,
we ingest its substance. We do not discard incorrect opinions,
especially those put forth by the narcissistic parent. We need to
learn to judge information about ourselves and to discard what is
wrong.
What experiences veried your parents’ negative view of you? I
was eleven and at camp. It was a “work camp” attended by creative
kids, a place where we could spend the entire day at what we liked
without having to compete at such activities as volleyball. We could
garden on the farm and watch a cow give birth. Almost everyone
went to calf birth. We could dance or play in the orchestra. There
were even sports. For me it was painting and sculpture with my
counselors, Phoebe and Jack. This was the rst time I suspected that
there were people like me in the world and felt the possibility of
friendship. But burdened with self-hatred, I had far to go before
reaching out. I escaped to art and hoped that camp, with its
emphasis on being natural, would help me nd and accept my self.
The head of the camp was Max, a psychologist from Switzerland.
Max would tell us stories ‘round the campre. I was transxed and
listening for the way out of my personal hell. His voice was pleasant
and quiet, not like that of my dogmatic and pursuing parents. The
story he told was of a woman who thought herself a hopeless loser.
Filled with self-hatred, she hid from human contact. I was pierced
by this. Wasn’t I hiding my inadequate self in painting and
sculpture? Didn’t my counselors know this? Would Max show me
how to end my self-dislike? I was scared and hopeful.
The woman went to a therapist, who tested her. Eventually, there
was a report. Her therapist told her that she was inadequate after
all. The kids all laughed at hearing this but I was demolished.
Another negative nailing. My parents were right in criticizing my
every move. The memory of Max’s story and my feelings about
being in a hopeless state as supported by his story were with me for
years. Max, a person I cared for, was insensitive and condemnatory
like my narcissistic father.
His story told me not to expect improvement. It showed how
inconsiderate people can be when you need them to be kind and
understanding. Perhaps Max was narcissistic and criticized others to
build himself up. Or he was the child of narcissists who made a joke
of the torture he had received from his parents. Either way, the
eect of this story made my parents’ rating become my fate.
Children of narcissists fear to know themselves, particularly when
what they nd within is anger. Life with vituperative parents forces
them into a compliant posture. When things go wrong they retreat
and do not know that much of what they fear from others is a
projection of their inner lives. Feelings of their own that are
attributed to others make the world a frightening place.
Carol had a narcissistic and attacking mother and was afraid to
know how angry this made her since her anger might show and
cause further attack. She hated acknowledging anger because this
seemed to make her resemble her abhorrent mother. In defense, she
had built the facade of a supersoft voice, saccharine smile, and
anxious eyes. She found anger in “powerful” people, whom she
thought were attacking her. She responded as if they were her
narcissistic mother and she their helpless child.
In therapy she walked on eggs, very fearful and too nice. She
avoided having a regular session, saying that her schedule was too
tight, but always found time to drink in the evening. She cancelled
sessions and said she wanted to quit therapy because she thought I
was “unfriendly.” I discussed her avoiding sessions to conceal her
feelings. Instead of looking at her temper she said I was attacking
her. She argued against it but then entered a shaky phase of
treatment in which she will come to her sessions even if she feels
attacked. Anger is omnipresent in her life, a part of herself she has
long avoided. Her husband is equally avoidant. He thinks their
marriage successful because they don’t communicate. Learning how
anger rules her thinking lies ahead. Both he and she will have to
face their fear of it.
Many children of narcissists are oversensitive, which means that
we overreact to what other people say and do, are hurt and
confused by the belief that someone intends the worst. We perceive
neutral behavior in a negative light. Being hypersensitive is like
having skin so badly burned you cannot lie beneath a sheet.
I became oversensitive as continuous criticism rubbed my ego
raw. My father criticized my smallest move and I found safety in
hiding. Imagine my panic when I had to learn the slide rule. It was
impossible to look long and hard enough to get the proper marks
lined up. A correct answer was only possible for bright people and
therefore not for me. I felt this way when a friend pushed me to use
the slide rule correctly.
He encouraged me and forced me to focus. I said I wasn’t sure
that I could learn the slide rule, to which he said, “So what!” That
he did not think life depended on being free of error was an
inebriating thought. Learning for the pleasure of it? Usually I ran
from testing myself, called myself inadequate, and avoided nding
further evidence of unworthiness. With worry over success and
failure stowed, I learned to use the slide rule. I saw from this
experience that I exaggerate my aws. I then resolved to waste less
time on worry and more on practicing what I care to do and know.
A common problem for children of narcissists is that we do not
know when to stop being mistreated. We do not even know when
we are actually being mistreated since we accept suering as a
means to winning favor. The possibility of favor gives pain a
pleasurable coloring. I visited my father’s narcissistic sister. She had
a grand dame aura as if the world revolved around her. She kissed
my left cheek after not seeing me for so long, then slapped my right
cheek for not having been in touch with her. I entered a stunned fog
as she laughed at the vanity of her move. She wasn’t bothered in the
least by it but I felt embarrassed, angry, and ashamed. She had hit
me for not calling her. She was wrong and she was right. Which was
it? I always felt punishment an appropriate treatment for me and I
shuddered into withdrawal.
I told my therapist about this event. He responded that the next
time she slapped me, I was to get her arm in a hammerlock and
demand that she explain why she had hit me instead of speaking her
displeasure. It was strange to hear him say that I am not to be
abused. He has said it over and over since I am psychologically hard
of hearing. He was not advising diplomatic retreat but rather that I
wean myself of the role of being a punching bag.
Sometimes we feel wounded and do not notice the wound as we
are pulled into the need system of the person harming us. For
example, at my graduation from college, the narcissistic aunt who
had hit me robbed me of my pleasure in this experience. I felt that I
was being hurt but could not see the situation handled any other
way. In the melee I did not protest against what was being done. I
thought it would be selsh to do so since her needs were more
important than mine. It was my lot in life to be mistreated and to
ignore it.
My aunt had been deprived of adequate schooling in Europe and
probably was jealous of my graduation. Her grandiose pride would
not permit her to admit such feelings. She arrived at my dorm with
other relatives. After visiting a while, she discovered the loss of a
necklace of great sentimental value. It had been a gift from someone
famous and we devoted ourselves to its recovery. We opened
drawers, looked under things, and grilled poor Reenie, the honest
and sensitive-to-tears cleaning lady. Reenie’s voice quavered as she
pleaded that she hadn’t robbed my aunt. Of course she hadn’t. So
terrible for her after years of service and terrible for me to be part of
it. I became depressed.
Did I graduate? I remember walking along a path to music,
wearing a black robe and hearing my aunt crying for her necklace.
When she went home, it was found lying as she had left it on her
dresser. Her resentful mourning for its loss had colored everything.
No apology to me was forthcoming. No one recognized any damage.
Not even I. I was not someone of worth. My graduation wasn’t
worth much.
In an opposite direction, after being so long mistreated, we can
nd mistreatment when none is there (although sensitivity may be
lacking). Like the day in my childhood my narcissistic father’s
relatives were visiting. All day, those friendly people whispered and
looked at me out of the corners of their eyes. They kept me out of
hearing. It was not like them to cut me out so much. I thought they
must be saying horrible things about me as my father always did.
They had learned the truth after years of erroneous love, which is
why no one now included me. No one seemed to care or know how I
felt.
This is a narcissistic tribe. Perhaps they didn’t notice my
depression. Narcissists are involved with themselves. Perhaps they
thought that my exclusion lled me with excitement and wonder.
Narcissistic people will project onto others the feelings that they
want to see created. For a child of a narcissist, the unknown is
fraught with danger. I did not feel wanted. What command,
criticism, or punishment awaited me? Or perhaps, as children of
narcissists, they did know how I felt and were enjoying the power of
passing punishment on to one they “loved.”
I passed a miserable day that strengthened my belief in my
worthlessness. After dinner, there was a stir in the kitchen and a
birthday cake appeared, alight with candles … for me. Eight of
them. I started to cry with relief. They had been setting up a
surprise party and all I had known was rejection. The intended
positive had been seen through negative light.
This is an example of looking into corners and seeing only
darkness. Children of narcissists do not expect the best. We are on
familiar ground when all turns out badly. We are ustered,
frightened, and sometimes pleased when it goes the other way, if we
can see it.
On the other hand, hypersensitivity to how one is treated or to
what one fears can have the paradoxical outcome of making us
under-sensitive toward others. To safeguard our skin we ferret out
and overreact to anticipated mistreatment. We run from it and
accuse the person of intending to mistreat us. Our charges are
hostile but we call the other person aggressive and charge him or
her with having sinister motivation. Our tone is one of trial and
punishment. We retaliate in the present for wrongs we have suered
in the past, the suerings of our narcissistic home.
For example, a woman in my psychotherapy group had always
been attacked by narcissistic parents. She showed uncanny accuracy
at nding people’s weak points. She acted as if they were out to get
her, to which her attacking them was an appropriate defense.
Nothing could stop her. She hoped that she would one day be close
to people but when the group began to point out that she pushed
them away, she quit group, saying that no one there could help her.
She needed the safety of being shut o. In her self-centered rejection
of others, she is close to narcissism.
We have to learn if our reaction to people’s errors and
shortcomings is magnied by the injuries we suered as a child.
Children of narcissists can have bitter views. Hypersensitivity
swamps the picture and unless we lower our standards and accept
imperfections we will have no close friends. We need to turn our
hypersensitivity into sensitivity to others’ feelings.
Along with hypersensitivity is the fear of harm. Years of invasive
mistreatment, of being corrected and ignored by narcissistic parents,
make us think that others will be the same. That is what we hear
when people speak and act. Our waking world is dark and covered
by a blackened sky. Unworthy us and punitive them. Pain is always
forthcoming. Our sleep is lled with dreams of punishment. This
expectation rules our daily lives, in which we nd intended harm.
We are hurt no matter what people do. Imagining such intentions is
enough to make us feel wounded. If we choose to be with
narcissists, they will actively wound us as well. But we can be hurt
by anyone. Socializing is our agony.
Addiction is another common response to being the child of a
narcissist. We see it in Nick and Victoria in this book. Being over- or
underweight is common but anything can be used as an addictive
defense. It is easy to fall into a self-destructive lifestyle after being
treated as expendable and worthless. Destroyed by our parents’
narcissistic blindness and without someone to observe and comfort
us, we now destroy ourselves.
Why don’t addicts stop? The problem is partly chemical. But more
than this, if we ask, am I worth it, the answer from our internalized
parent says, “No, you’re not.” Feeling unworthy, we lack motivation
to change our habits and improve our lives. We might as well die by
our own drugged hand and have a little pleasure on the way down.
We do not know how blind we are to what is going on as drugs
cover our hostility and despair. We can be friendly on the surface
and secretly bitter.
Pills, booze, sex, chasing after nancial success, lovers, you name
it. Anything can be used as an addictive distraction that takes us
away from what we feel. Because addiction keeps us from dealing
with our problems (while creating others), we need progressively
more of the drug as unattended problems increase and pull us down.
Rather than suer, we increasingly turn to what makes us feel good
and forget. We get further away from the knowledge of self that
would set us free.
Often our narcissistic parents were addicts of some kind. They
took various kinds of drugs, literal and metaphoric, to shut out the
world and we follow them on the same or dierent substances. Like
them, we believe life to be hopeless and take their approach of
being out of contact. To become unaddicted and function well, we
should know that feeling our pain and seeing reality serves a
purpose. The pain only lasts a while and seeing what causes our
problems helps us to change in order to appreciate ourselves and
our lives.
Procrastination is a common shortcoming of one whose
performance has been attacked. Low in self-esteem, many of us
think we should put o action until we feel suciently condent. It
is an error to believe that we must love ourselves before
undertaking a dicult project or relationship. We postpone what we
think is beyond our grasp, giving ourselves no opportunity to learn
from error. Raised to magnify our limitations, inferiority feelings
keep us from the world. We fail at school, job, marriage, work, child
rearing, and so on. We fulll our predicted destiny.
We want to strengthen our skills innitely before going out; we
never feel strong enough. One man was afraid of eating most foods
and was always readying himself for more extensive eating. He
never ate anything but lima beans and “anken” beef, a Jewish form
of cooking in which meat is served boiled or potted. He lived to a
ripe old age but always with that sense of putting o the adventure
of eating. He hugged a familiar way which he regarded as the safer
path.
Our view of self is colored by our narcissistic parents’ opinions. If
they manipulate us to t into their schema, which gives them
satisfaction, we feel ourselves to be failures. Even if we pass high,
we think it failure. I have progressively hoisted myself out of the pit
of condemnation and do not know if I am the idiot my narcissistic
parent labeled me or reasonably bright. I have gotten all kinds of
labels. My concern with this value system shows I am still
vulnerable to it to some degree. It is hard to get free of ingrained
negative opinion and to use one’s abilities fully.
Children of narcissists usually do not know their abilities because
the parents’ responses interfered with their unfolding. Often the
child does not get into something of personal interest. An
overachiever may do things important to her parent but not to
herself. Many so-called “successful” children of narcissists have
weak egos and do little outside of given margins because success is
too important to venture into the unknown. If narcissistic pressure
forces a child to achieve, her ego may not develop since she gives
credit to her parents. To support her parents’ vanity she gives away
all credit for what she has done. We need to strive for what we truly
desire and if we fail to reach our goal, feel stronger for the trying.
Self-worth does not depend on the results.
In addition to being hurt we have learned many of our parents’
narcissistic habits since they taught us that narcissism is the better
way. We do not recognize that we have narcissistic defenses and
patterns of perception that make us behave insensitively and feel
morally correct. If others complain about us, we cannot understand.
Our defenses shield us from their questions, their pained and
censuring voices.
We need to know our narcissistic habits, that compote of traits we
would be better o without. Our narcissism is like the behavior of
prisoners of war surrounded by life-endangering guards. To deny
our vulnerability, we manifest the stance of those who threaten us.
We acquire the parental traits that caused us the most pain.
Narcissism can be manifested on the inside or the outside. We can
be internally narcissistic and externally sacricing, as when I think
myself superior to you for the sacrices that I make; externally
narcissistic when I feel inadequate and act superior to you to hide
my feelings. I hide inferior feelings from you and me. Vivian had
endless dreams of rejection. No man would want her as his lover,
few women would want her as their friend. She avoided rejection by
being the rst one to reject.
Another common narcissistic habit is to criticize. The child of a
narcissist who emulates his parent is always trying to improve the
other person. That is what his parents did to him and to everyone
else. As an act of identication with his parents, he responds to
people’s errors with the kind of rage his parents showered on him.
He wants to accept people as they are and has been repeatedly told
to do so but feels inner pressure to correct. He thinks, “Doesn’t
he/she want to know that he is doing something wrong?” The
other’s error causes him pain. Rather than consider the distorting
eect of being hypersensitive, he personalizes the other’s behavior
and takes it as intended to wound. Hurt feelings move him to react
with a barrage of criticism.
Another example of parental narcissism appears in the child in a
mutated form. Andrea had narcissistic parents who lied to her
incessantly. Out of reaction, she became a compulsive truth teller
and downright unpleasant. Worshiping the power of the word,
Andrea’s aggression went into giving unsolicited advice.
People would start getting close to her and then want to get away.
She was pained by their departures but could not admit that her
truth-telling made them leave. Even when they complained about
her “advice,” she thought that telling them the truth was for their
good. She saw them as afraid of what they needed and had no
awareness of her vested interest in a missionary role. If she felt
guilty about the pain she caused, she told herself to do it “one more
time.” Telling the truth did the damage to them that her narcissistic
parents did to her by lying. In each instance, the feelings and needs
of the other person were not respected. A good example is the time
Victoria told me that a man I had known and dated for several years
once told her that he wanted to be free of me and asked her for a
date, which she refused because he was not up to her level. This is
truth-telling with a demeaning and arrogant edge. It is how her
narcissistic mother talked to her.
If despite complaints from others our repetition goes on, it shows
that we have identied with our narcissistic parent. If we cannot
change behavior that we know is causing trouble, look for the gain
it brings. Such gain may be subtle and include playing a supporting
role to narcissistic parents by resembling them.
Much of the sense of self is in bodily feeling. Often children of
narcissists don’t know how to read their bodies because their
parents did not give the child’s emotional and bodily sensations an
appropriate label, did not call a spade a spade. The parents were not
in tune with the child’s emotions and labeled the child’s feelings
according to their own moods and needs. If we disagreed with them
they said we were in error and attempted to change our minds. If
we said we were lonely they tried to make us think that people were
unimportant. They made us eat when they thought that we were
hungry, feeding us portions that they felt suited our needs.
Alienated from the inner self, we do not understand the body’s
message. Estrangement means that our bodily sensation lacks
decipherable meaning. Eastern philosophers say that we are neither
body nor mind but that if we had to choose the more essential
carrier, it would be the body. By this they mean that we are a
vibrating energy system not dierent from the world at large. But
even in the Western approach, bodily feeling is the direct eect of
what we think. If we are sad or happy, our body tells us so. The
body gives us vital clues to what is going on. Inability to understand
the body’s messages keeps us from deep understanding of self. The
body is the agent of emotion. Thoughts set up bodily feelings
although we do not feel the process. If we can’t understand our
bodily sensations, who or what are we? Only thought? What is the
result of having undeciphered emotional messages?
A person who is estranged from the meaning of his feelings is
puzzled by an ache in the heart, palpitations in the chest, shortness
of breath, a churning in the stomach, etc. He is indierent to or
frightened of them, as if his head were under attack by his body.
Mind and body are not one to such a person.
If he gives practical thought to sensation, its meaning may be
perceived from afar. Perhaps he heard of similar sensations on TV.
Such knowledge is vague—a word, an idea—but not a call to action.
Bodily feelings that are disturbing or even symptoms of a serious
disorder are dimly perceived. Pain in the body means that
something is amiss. Pain is a symptom and sign asking for attention.
Pain diers according to the severity and chronicity of the disorder
it expresses. Emotions also aect the body. Mind creates a stomach
ulcer, upsets digestion and breathing. Often we feel a body ache
without understanding its meaning.
Take the way an average person perceives and responds to a
headache. A pain in the head signies something in the body, but
what? Most people believe that a headache is an inexplicable
occurrence signifying nothing, an occasion that will soon be over.
Take an aspirin and forget it. The children of narcissists can be even
more extreme in ignoring and dismissing their sensations. Many
children of narcissists move in an addictive direction. With their
drug of choice, they retreat from body/mind feelings to an unfeeling
state. Sensation is removed but its cause remains.
Below is a discussion of some bodily sensations felt by children of
narcissists who lacked the ability to understand the relationship to
their physical state and what to do about it. There are innitely
more body/mind feelings than these. A person who is alienated
from her feelings can misunderstand any sensation of which her
body, mind, and spirit dreams. I use the word “spirit”
metaphorically here to signify the inner self calling for attention
through ideas and feelings that a person can misunderstand or
ignore. With such estrangement, children of narcissists may need
outside help to understand.
Eric was raised under an onslaught of parental narcissism and was
unable to cope. His parents wanted him to be an outstanding
scholar, an A-1 achiever compared to everyone else. He was upset
by their pressure to succeed and by the stress of competition. Many
narcissistic families make their children compete by declaring one
the winner and the others the losers. Their children function in
response to the parents’ need by feeling competitive and imposed
upon from without.
Eric was less gifted than his brother, less able to function under
stress. He tried but he could not set the record of unalloyed
academic brilliance that his parents required. He varied his goals
and defensively did not choose a career. In his early twenties, he
suered a kind of nervous breakdown when his kid brother began to
show intellectual gifts. When he was unable to ignore his narcissistic
parents’ comparing him with their other children, his life was
undermined by this intrusive system of valuing. He competed for
value and felt like a failure.
His parents’ wish that he excel and his feeling of inadequacy led
to self-destructive eating. He called himself a “genius manqué,” a
man of undiscovered brilliance who buried himself in food. The
child part of him was gratied by such behavioral regression. A
focus on eating reinstates a period of life when oral ingestion was
central. For the moment, parental requirements are pushed aside.
Overeating feels good in the mouth but painful to the body.
Accepting such pain supports his parents’ view of him as unworthy.
He is estranged from his body and does not consider its feelings.
There is no self-love if you treat your body with disrespect.
Mistreatment of the self is used to quiet the punishing negative
introject.
The only thing he paid attention to was intellectual
perambulations. His enormous vocabulary did not dispel the mental
doubt that ruled him. His posturing and much of what he did was
more image than content. He created an impressive image to hide
behind, and was out of touch with a body that went downhill. He
quoted Shakespeare to hide his sense of nonidentity.
He would appraise his body but did not give it sustained
attention. Finding himself too fat, he would grow thin, then fat
again. Upset by his appearance, he put himself through periods of
overhaul. Diet was allied with intermittent maniacal exercise. He
went from no exercise to a program of strenuous endeavor. Out of
touch with the meaning of body sensation, he was insensitive to his
physical limitations. His narcissistic parents required that he go
beyond his abilities, and so even with his body, he disregarded
feeling. Perhaps he liked the sense of overwork. One day, while
jogging, he died of a heart attack.
There probably were prior sensations of heart diculty—pain and
shortness of breath, exhaustion. His parents’ view was directed to
outside opinion and unconcerned with the body’s messages. Many
children of narcissists are so directed. They are unaware of the
meaning of what their bodies tell them. They can develop serious
and chronic diseases, or can die.
The body speaks about emotional states that the mind cannot
understand. Ellen had a severely narcissistic father who aimed to
dominate her life. She also had a symbiotic mother who tried to
control her by lling all of Ellen’s needs. Actually the needs she
tried to ll were primarily her own. In symbiotic fashion she
thought her own wishes were supposed to be shared by her
daughter. Both parents constantly reshaped the child and tried to
bring her under their aegis. The child’s sense of self was depleted
and thin. Her parents dominated her self-perception as two warring
negative introjects. These fought in her mind as they did in life.
Each wanted a dominant position in her being and further depleted
her feelings of self.
From this war, she had the most peculiar body sensations. It was
as if each arm were being pulled in an opposite direction and by a
dierent amount of force. This tugging had nothing to do with her
desire. She desperately wanted it to stop and felt that she was going
mad with this inner sensation unrelated to her feelings. Who was
the puller and what was the message? She felt pulled apart but did
not know how to read it.
In fact, her body expressed her feelings, which came from the
warring parents inside her mind. Each one wanted total control and
in trying to achieve this was contradicting the other and crushing
her self. She was emotionally at the end of her tether, even ready to
die. She couldn’t stand being pushed around from within and
entered therapy.
She saw that she was torn by indecision. Did she own her body
and mind? Her introject said, “Your parents know what is best for
you.” This scenario made her confused and increasingly out of touch
with her self. It was easier to forget her disagreement with what
they said to her than to hold on to conict. Often she did not
remember her ideas, a common confusion for children of narcissists.
She tried to think what her parents dictated and didn’t recognize
that they undermined her thoughts and moved her from her own
sensation.
After a considerable stretch of psychotherapy in which she
expressed grief and growing conict with her parents’ opinions, the
physical feeling of being torn apart disappeared. Although conict
with her parents remained, her self became strong enough to occupy
psychological home base.
Sensations vary with their emotional causes. Among the negative
sensations are anxiety, fatigue, allergy, feelings from poor diet (like
energy highs and lows from sugar, allergic dripping nose and foggy
mind from milk), hypersensitivity, etc. Attention to our bodily
sensations and our understanding of them can be contaminated by
our need for parental approval. A parent-dominated mind says, “Do
it,” no matter how we feel. It is the parent’s ambition that motivates
us. Driven to fulll our parent’s wishes, we think that our physical
needs represent disloyalty to their personal ambitions. Personality
and self are almost unrelated. Personality wants the fame required
by the parent while the self wants to laugh and relax. In becoming
true to our self, can we stand by its needs if they are not universally
popular? Experience of self is the direction we need to take.
Can we develop special strengths from being raised in a
narcissistic home and can such strength then lead to weakness?
John in Chapter 5 was demeaned by his father into feeling
worthless. Self-hatred and anger caused him to fail at school. Failing
was his subconscious way of attacking his father by not supporting
the parent’s grandiose image. That same failure pleased his father by
reifying John’s condemned position. After hitting bottom, John
fought to recover and tried many solutions. He developed strength
from this ght, especially from seeking a view of life that meditation
brings.
John lives under stringent nancial conditions. Using meditation
to observe himself and his life, he is able to accept suering to the
point of mastery. Mastery entails looking at pain without a struggle.
With acceptance, pain withdraws to the outer reaches of the mind.
Buddhism nds life lled with dukkha, a Pali word that means
suering caused by clinging to what feels good and pushing away
what feels bad. Dukkha causes people to struggle against what is.
Narcissists are especially trapped in a push-pull struggle because
they cannot stand their imperfections. Meditation keeps you looking
at the contents of your mind until you see that all things change.
Then the tendency to cling and resist is lessened.
Meditation is not a good way to solve neurotic problems. It
weakens John in his search for his self, since it is an indirect
approach to what must change. Many a meditation teacher has told
his troubled students to get psychotherapy. This will help them to
meditate without distraction. Meditation takes a perpendicular look
at what passes by. The mind’s eye keeps the xed position of an
observer. Thoughts just drop away. Therapy follows problems
horizontally, staying with thoughts to their source. Then you can
pull out the problem with its roots. From this you discover the roots
of your problems but the observing position is lost.
Because of the weakness of a meditative approach to problems,
John has not analyzed what bothers him. He is driven by angry
rebellion against unfair beings whose power he desires. He does not
know that he is impelled by anger he could not show his dad.
Ventilating this anger to his self-centered boss is not worth the
consequences. John does not know his anger’s roots. Holding anger
in would allow him to get certied as a meditation teacher.
Expressing anger against his teacher turns him into the failure
designated by his father. Children of narcissists have indirect ways
of harming themselves to please their parents. The next step John
must take is to face the anger he carries from his past.
I asked Delores, John’s sister, about the strength she derived from
being raised in a narcissistic home. Again there is weakness linked
to strength. Strength comes from exibility. A rigid stance creates
problems. Delores spoke of coping with a selsh, violent, and
narcissistic dad by a force of concentration that could take her mind
away. She could do remarkable things in distracting settings. The
miserable atmosphere of her home was obscured for her by her
interest in painting and dancing. She created an internal scene that
fascinated her regardless of what was going on. Shutting out
objectionable events was her strength. As an adult such an ability
helped her create a fantasy world in a shop that customers could
enter.
Weakness also came from this strength. Used to shutting things
out, she automatically focused tightly on what interested her and
missed the larger picture. People took advantage of her. Forgetful
behavior taught everyone including her daughter not to obey or
even remember her requests. She bred personal confusion when she
forgot where she wildly tossed her keys and spend vast amounts of
time recovering them. There is strength in her concentration,
weakness in a lack of control as to where and when she focuses.
Being vague may express her need for a parent to take care of her.
When Delores met her brother’s Zen teacher, he oered her cookies
of varied shapes from a tray, and of the one she took he said, “That
signies confusion.”
For Delores to grow strong again, she would have to gain control
over when she shuts things out through concentration. She needs to
feel responsible for the results of her actions and not to accept and
act out the poor self-image her father gave her. She must also learn
not to inconvenience others with her careless deeds, as her
narcissistic father did to her and the rest of the family.
Often, an initial move for independence involves joining a group.
Membership in a group represents opposition to the parent. A
narcissistic parent wants to determine her child’s style and life
objectives. Her child wants separation but, fearing to stand alone,
joins an all-encompassing group as a halfway move to freedom. He
thinks that membership expresses his individuality and cites group
laws as buttressing independence from the parent. But such
membership often limits his search for a self that needs separation
to exist. In order not to be immersed in his parent’s narcissistic net
he buries himself in a group that operates like a narcissistic family
and requires identity with members’ goals and ethos. It is a style of
life that reinforces personal nonbeing.
Herman joined Jews for Jesus as a young adult to oppose and bug
his narcissistic mother, who followed Jewish law. Extremely
oended by what he had done, she plagued him with
counterarguments and joined a group that kidnapped “joiners” to
“straighten them out.” She mailed iers to families that had “lost”
their children to such groups and in her unconscious mind every
child returned was her son.
Beyond the pleasure of upsetting his mother, how helpful was
such membership? Immersion in Jews for Jesus was a step toward
independence. Rebellion can trigger growth, but only if it is a
jumping-o place to further development. Herman later needed his
child to act a certain way to give the image of power, indicating
that he did not go on to feel suciently strong and autonomous
himself.
Eventually Herman left the group since he was tired of ghting
his mother this way. Needing to feel manly, he felt it wasn’t very
masculine to have a group lead him by his nose. To increase
strength requires self-knowledge that comes from looking at one’s
doubts. Herman later foisted a pseudoimage of strength on himself
and his child. If a person treats his child as an extension of himself,
the child does not feel like a person and the narcissistic problem
passes on to the next generation.
My own experience with a group came out of an interest in
meditation. Through what happened, I saw how children of
narcissists are led by the parent into black-and-white thinking. I was
with a meditation teacher in the United States who helped
meditators awaken kundalini energy. This is a feeling of vibration
that travels a twin spiral path up the spine and is accompanied by
meditative experiences. Did such feelings come from the teacher or
from my imagination? The teacher seemed to be a catalyst for what
happened in meditation but what about the rest of him? Discordant
facts came to my awareness and made me wonder if meditative
good can come from a person who is far from perfect. Or can any
good come at all? I was raised in an “o with his head!” narcissistic
environment in which a person was either perfectly good or
unacceptable.
I never liked his appearance. Squinting behind dark glasses, he
looked like a croupier from Monte Carlo. I didn’t like his followers,
people who worshiped him and told us to defer. I didn’t like his
rates, great sums for room, board, and meditation sessions, far more
proportionally than is charged in India, where the teaching of
meditation is not a business. Where did the money go? The hall in
which we met was handsome. I didn’t hear much about hospitals or
schools being built with our fees.
As a psychologist and the child of a narcissist, I am slow to
surrender to the pressure to believe. I want direct experience of the
facts. I saw an article in an investigative magazine written by some
of his former sta. Not many of the current group would read it but
I did. It said that the ashram’s money went into a Swiss bank
account. It described the meditation teacher as a chaser of moneyed
folk and a sexual molester of young girls who were left in his
charge. It said that he used the radiance of his position to seduce the
young folk and called him a man of temper who had once speared
his dresser with a fork. As they say, power corrupts.
This article brought my doubts home. Now I knew why he seemed
to have a croupier’s face and why I always felt a contrast between
how he looked and what he did to help us meditate. His followers
described their teacher’s wayward behavior as a test of our faith, an
explanation that was intended to put one’s thought to sleep.
I thought I knew some of his bad side. My sense of what was good
about what he could do went with it. I was swamped with negative
feelings. How could he teach meditation? I asked others about the
facts but could get no answer. How could he or anyone be a
combination of bad and good? My narcissistic parents found most
people bad and utterly condemned them. Learning this from them, I
found bad in my teacher and condemned his good. All or nothing
erased the complexity of what is.
It is hard to stop thinking in dichotomies. His followers said he
was perfect and the article a lie. They said he did them so much
good that they didn’t care what was written. Some joined me and
called him totally bad. As I matured, I saw that he was a good
teacher of a form of meditation that takes potency from its teacher. I
also believed that he sexually abused his young followers,
overcharged, and took funds for personal use. It was painful to
accept him as a two-sided gure, a man of high ability with
signicant failings, on the basis of which I did not want him as my
teacher. Character is more important to me than skill. The
knowledge that I developed from this group experience was rst,
not to believe what others tell me and second, that human good is
mixed with bad.
A meditation teacher is like a therapist. The best therapist is one
with good character. With such a person we can be ourselves and
trust in his or her response. For the child of a narcissist, it is
important not to create a false image of self and others in order to
please new people. Part of my doubt in this teacher came from a
Zen description in which Buddha is quoted as saying, “Slay me if
you meet me on the road,” which means not to believe in the image
of the man but to reach an understanding of the essence of life
through self-exploration.
My meditation teacher told his pupils that “leaders come from
followers.” Too long beneath the narcissistic thumb, I want to test
all teachings and not to defer to a demand that I submit. Children of
narcissists are raised to be believers. Fighting free of the narcissistic
inuence, they become overly suspicious. The next step is to
develop our own judgment and to change what in our
understanding is proved false.
The people in this group had a brainwashed quality. Hypnotized
people are happy but not with the happiness of freedom. When I
told people at the ashram that I was leaving, his followers said that I
would go to hell, which engendered in me a wave of fear. That I
could still feel frightened by such threats shows that the child of
harsh parents continues to live inside me. The child lives on within
the adult but through analysis his power to control gets smaller. The
needs of the child are still felt but the adult part of the personality
knows that the narcissistic parent cannot meet such needs and
directs the self to seek sources of gratication that are more
available.
Narcissistic parents used to frighten me by a withdrawal of their
love. Despite such pressures I now choose my own path, which is a
struggle and a thrill.
14
HOW TO FIND AND HEAL YOUR SELF
We need to counter false images that
we have accepted, to break the mold of habits that tie us. From
childhood on I thought a sauna utterly embarrassing. My narcissistic
father had despised my body as at-chested and too large in the
buttocks. I wouldn’t dream of removing my clothes in public. One
New Year’s week, I visited Vermont with a lover whose friends
hauled us into their sauna. I was in a state of dread but there was no
way to decline gracefully. I felt so frightened of nudity that I had
taken to bed and had to be dragged out to participate. I didn’t want
to admit my self-dislike to them. I had intense fear of their agreeing
with my physical self-rejection.
I won’t go into the horrors of undressing. Let it be known that I
found a solitary and hopefully somewhat hidden position on the
shelf of a former chicken coop turned sauna. It was New Year’s Eve
and the entire crew, including the children, drank champagne and
reclined together. We listened to Caruso on a wind-up record player,
laughed, and told stories. Mom was unabashed despite an
appendectomy scar. We got so hot that we dashed out into the snow
on an incredibly cold night and had a snowball ght. The feel of a
snowball on heated skin is like a cool caress. Naked and rolling in
the snow, chasing one another with snowballs. What of my nudity?
It was the snow that counted. Giving and not getting snow on skin.
It was terric. After this, I stopped caring about being seen naked.
Years of subsequent experience made it easy. The sauna was great
but I like steam baths better. Nudity, big deal! My body too
horrible? Who says? Only one person, my narcissistic father, whose
negative opinion hit home.
Look, taste, touch, smell, feel, imagine, try what interests you.
Experience confronts what we are taught to believe and what was
drilled into our brains. We cling to our notions but, short of
insanity, cannot totally disregard the facts.
We can use techniques to become our selves and to develop the
self. Techniques are dierent from the roles our narcissistic parents
assume to cover their footprints so that no one can follow and
evaluate them. If recognized as they really are, they expect further
damage to their egos. Only a perfect image is safe. Roles help them
avoid detection but a role will not help the self to grow. Their roles
depict greatness but hypersensitivity to the smallest sign of
nonappreciation reveals profound and unadmitted doubts.
It is good to experience our selves with a method by which we are
transformed but not hidden. A method is dierent from a role. The
self can be itself and use a method to develop. There are many
methods. The one you choose should challenge and interest you.
Once, I was looking for space to rent from a woman who told me to
come to her party that evening and chat. I did not know that it was
a casting party. She needed actors and invited me to join the
production. After years of therapy, I could not let myself walk away
just because I was lled with fear. I told my quaking self, “These are
only feelings,” and knew better than to succumb to terror. Acting
had been one of my greatest fears. I felt that I would die on stage. I
had already suered severe embarrassment in the limited arena of
my narcissistic father’s critical eyes. Surely I would forget my lines.
My maturing self cornered me into saying, “Now is the time to test
your fears, to see if you are as inadequate as you believe.”
We were into rehearsal when my father visited me and listened
with a sharp and critical ear as I spoke lines in the privacy of my
room. Although I spoke in modulated tones, his hearing is excellent.
Afterward, he mocked me, made fun of my voice and of the
necessity of practice. “Is it really so important?” He thought my
needing so much practice showed inadequacy. I shrank from his
words and felt I should not be acting. For children of narcissists, it is
hard to take on any project without parental invasion. The parent
cannot allow his child to be an independent being. What if you are
doing something of which he disapproves? What if it is something
that he cannot do himself? I saw in my parent’s treatment the origin
of my hypersensitivity and went on rehearsing.
It was a morality play about a man who realizes that living for
money and power is useless. At his death he triumphs because he
feels his connection with life. The theme touched me deeply, having
been so long abrogated by my parent’s tongue. I was happy in my
role even though I played a hostile and greedy gure. We have all
such roles within us.
Rehearsals were a torture because I put the audience above me
and was afraid of them. Fear of performing came from seeing them
as critical parents. My parents told me to be perfect. Expecting
perfection makes your errors wound you. Therapy showed a
dierent way, to see the audience as my friends, to do my best and
live with it. It was I who made the audience hard to reach.
The play went on and after initial nervousness I loved the plot’s
every moment. When the meditative walk ostage to no applause
was completed, the audience left contemplating and the play was
over. I went out to nd my mother hanging on to the stone railing
of the bridge that covered the theater’s brook. I expected to hear
how bad I had been when I asked, “Mother, how was it?” She
looked up, eyes lled with tears and a catch in her voice, saying, “It
was wonderful.” We shared the joy of my courageous impulse.
Hypersensitivity grew smaller with each playing. We performed and
the audience responded. Initially scared, I grew to enjoy the
performance. My exhibitionistic part, suppressed in childhood, came
out.
How do we nd out what is important for us? It is not enough for
children of narcissists to follow the marked trail that others lay
before them. Strength develops out of ghting with our handicaps.
We evolve from struggling to cope with our diculties.
My parents made me feel unlovable. My father said that my need
for friends was excessive and made me unhappy, that I didn’t t in,
lacked what was wanted, so why bother? Thinking this way was a
conveyor belt to loneliness. What if my single friend turned against
me, was sick, or moved away? Why try to make new friends if the
outcome is predetermined? I found relief from such failure in
nature. To begin with, my child’s mind made me part of a family of
pigeons that nested behind the ceramic cornucopia outside my
room. Pigeon humming soothed me, that and the love with which
the mother pigeon fed her babies. I considered them as backup
parents and coaxed them onto my window ledge for crumbs of
bread. It was terrible when my grandmother dislodged their “lthy”
nest with her broom. I cried out, “What of the babies?” As always,
no one listened. Thankfully, the pigeons came back.
Loving pigeons and other animals was the way I bound myself to
life. It moved me toward ecology. Each of us must nd the thing
that talks to our heart. As a child, living part-time in the country, I
was very concerned with animals. I was a pantheist then and
probably still am, feeling the spirit of living things. One time, my
father was driving the nal few yards before our bridge when a
bird, followed by its mate, itted in front of the car and was hit. He
stopped driving to watch it fall to the ground, with its mate ying
over, swooping and circling the body. It was sad, the bird wanting
to be rejoined with its partner, who lay quivering on the grass. My
father did not know how to help as words and paragraphs tumbled
from his mouth. Hard for me to concentrate on his words. Perhaps it
was something about the inevitability of death. He did not oer to
go for help, to do anything. I was too numb to speak as he talked me
back into the car.
We traveled the few hundred light years of yards to our house to
nd an ongoing cocktail party conducted by his girlfriend. Guests
came over as some tears began to ow. Away from my disapproving
parent, I could cry. But the tragedy remained and no one did
anything about the bird. I felt abandoned along with it.
Years later, I joined an environmental group to keep away a
radium dump. Then I helped stave o development of a car wash
that would spoil our local well water. I worked with people trying to
preserve the local environment from total “development.” As I
write, I look at my bird feeder and the tiny beasts hanging about.
This scene speaks to and from my self.
Sometimes experience is needed to show us what we lack. We feel
discomfort and intellectual understanding but do not really know
what was wrong in our upbringing until we see that life is led a
dierent way. Experience drives home its point. Travel can do this
for us, which is why I am drawn to places far away, even primitive
to some. Although initially fearful, I go without an accompanying
group to feel myself “there” as much as possible. I learn something
of the language and make local friends.
Travel is outstanding, because it teaches about how people can
live in nonnarcissistic ways, although much of the growth that
prepared me for this occurred by barely perceptible degrees,
nourished by psychotherapy. What drew me to Asia had a lot to do
with being the child of a narcissist. When I was very young, feeling
repressed and inadequate, I read a story that caught my interest. It
was about Tibetan monks who constructed box kites in which they
stood erect and ew on air currents over vast depths of sky. If ying
made them arrogant they would unknowingly shift posture and
some would plummet to their deaths. I do not know if any of this
really occurred but I was drawn to a people who wanted not to be
ego-ridden. I had a secret, almost magical, wish to go and see them.
Years later, in the midst of my training in clinical psychology, I
also did physical yoga and was introduced to mystical reading. One
book, Be Here Now, was by Richard Alpert (Ram Das). Alpert was a
former psychology professor who went to India, where he
accidentally met and became the student of Nimcaroli Baba, a man
with great mystical awareness. Ram Das’s writing touched me, not
only because it was a fascinating subject but also because he spoke
the tongues of psychology and meditation. He described his teacher
as a man who transcended the greed of narcissism. I wondered,
could there be such people?
I read Maya Baba’s God Speaks, in which he described a vision of
primal intelligence developing upward through all things in order of
increasing sensitivity until it reaches divine union with itself. This
touched my feeling for nature. It said to me that there is more to life
than ownership. I read Alexandra David Neel’s writing about
walking across Tibet accompanied by a young Tibetan man who was
her adopted son and guide. They saw wonders of human ability, like
men moving in meditative trances over great distances and at
fantastic speeds. They saw men undergoing the mind-controlled test,
while in meditative trances, of drying wet sheets that were wrapped
around their bodies in the erce Himalayan cold. It was so fantastic
to read this that I experimented with my own mental ability to
produce heat. I was able to stand in the cold country air and think
myself warm, become chilly, and think myself warm again.
Raised in a narcissistic family that worshiped excessive ego, I felt
there was something for me in a people that eschewed it. Asian
mystical literature speaks of abandoning the ego-ridden state. I also
loved mountains and looked forward to the Himalayas, days of
walking foreign paths, hearing nothing but the wind and falling
waters. There was the incredible beauty of villages set so high with
huge mountains above and below.
And the people! Raised in isolation, it interested me to be with
people who regarded friendship as rule number one. I remember
reading Buddha’s response to Ananda, his slowest disciple. Ananda
said, “Friendship seems very important to me. Is it?” Buddha
answered, “Friendship is the most important thing.” What would it
be like to go to a place where at least some people were like that?
Would I become free of my fear of rejection?
I was increasingly aware that we barely use our mental powers. It
is common to turn o and lead a passive life. But there are many
wonders to know and I had too long deferred to narcissistic control
to resubmit to it. Darjeeling, in the Indian Himalayas, is near Tibet.
The expected journey was a gift I’d give myself when I nished my
degree.
When I got my Ph.D. I went to Asia. I remember my rst day in
Darjeeling, a city of brick and wood whose curved and winding
streets crept up the Himalayas. There was a huge round temple with
a friendly eye at its brow that regarded all, including monkeys that
scampered in its courtyard. In free-standing stalls, there were
knitted sweaters of yak hair, hand-woven cotton, Tibetan gems from
her inland sea, the coral and turquoise worn by long-haired Tibetan
ladies. Appearing from behind the moving mists was a huge and
distant mountain, Kanchenjunga, third highest in the world, on the
border between Nepal and Sikkim. It was surrounded by so many
peaks up there with her.
The people were very calm, some with painted red dots in the
middle of their foreheads in celebration of the religious spirit. I
passed a boy in his teens who must have had an accident since he
walked the street wearing nothing below his shirt. No one fussed or
looked at him in an embarrassing way. So much consideration!
What kind of city was this? People did not walk about naked. Dress
was modest. Clearly his appearance was due to some kind of
unavoidable circumstance. There was a fruit and vegetable market
in which stood a huge bull, the king of its animals, sedately
munching on throwaway rinds and peels. All was alive and
strangely soothing.
In late afternoon, I walked past a building from which there came
a happy sound. As I stepped back in the street to look up to the
second oor, I was spotted by someone near the window.
Immediately I was invited to a beautiful dinner given in celebration
of the birthday of their dead father. Dinner was served on a banana
leaf. I was their father’s guest and they became my friends. They
were beyond narcissism. In my amazement at what can be, I took
them as my teachers, so dierent were they from the guarded
suspicion of my home. My heart opened. How can I repay my
friends? With love. By telling others about them.
On a hiking permit, I then went to the mountains with my Sherpa
guide, Lagkpa. I was welcomed into villages whose people included
me in their nightly singing. I walked with them formally as they
pulled me along to receive their monk’s gift to us of rice wrapped in
leaves, and other holy objects. For each object we made a
communal march to where the monk sat. He gave to us and we gave
to one another. To people with colds, I gave my vitamin C, to their
kids my cray-pas chalks and pad and watched them draw beautiful
pictures until all the chalks were gone. I watched a young boy learn
to play my newly acquired bamboo ute in a matter of hours. We all
sat on the second-oor balcony of a house that rented the open
space to hikers. We laughed ourselves silly watching people creep
mincingly across a rope bridge that we had just managed to cross.
Meanwhile the boy practiced ute nonstop. When he got to quarter
notes we sang Hare Krishna to his playing. I had never seen such
concentration and sharing. It was impossible to be left out, an
overwhelming experience to one who had been raised by distancing
narcissistic parents.
Children of narcissists benet from stepping into the unknown of
any type, be it people, reading, growing things, experimenting,
playing instruments. It can be a trip to a place so far from parental
judgment that it makes you feel beyond your parent’s reach, so far
that you can try out dierent ways of being.
Take sexuality. So much controlled by our parents’ prohibitive
eye, children of narcissists often experience sexual inhibition. In our
mind, the parent’s eye is on us when we have sex and can’t let go.
Many discover their sexual selves when far away from the external
parent, since their own desire experienced in the absence of the
actual parent can lessen the negating power of the parent within.
I was in Puri, India, with my Italian friend Giancarlo, a man I had
met in Calcutta, where we both were so terried of the inquisitive
glances and questions from innumerable people that we
immediately started traveling together. We were afraid and resentful
of their intrusiveness, while at the same time we were fascinated by
them. He had come to help the refugees of Bangladesh who had
undergone severe ooding. I did not fear Giancarlo the way I feared
my narcissistic father. Giancarlo was so open and friendly that I
even looked down on him a bit. Children of narcissists must learn to
eradicate such narcissistic evaluation. One night after eating a large
and special meal prepared for us by Brahmans, who are supposed to
be especially clean, I suered a terrible case of dysentery during
which Giancarlo held me for hours over the latrine, which happily
was a hole in the oor. A oor-level hole let me weakly crouch
there and be supported by Giancarlo as I went through the throes of
dysentery. After that, I had little shame with him.
We were traveling south from Calcutta, each night neatly tucked
in under our own separate mosquito nettings. I paraded around half
undressed because I never thought of him as a sexual partner. He
was too kind to appeal to me that way, not the the child of a
rejecting narcissistic father. It went like this until a monsoon cut us
o from the world in our cottage on the beach. The utterly black sky
brought incredible winds that banged the wooden shutters against
the wall. No one was out in rain that poured down in a steady
stream, a deluge so strong it could rip your clothing o. I always
have been moved by natural things. Perhaps that is what brought
me to his bed. That friendly, strong, warm, and generous man and I
were eye to eye. Previous experiences of sex had been with
narcissistic lovers who closed their eyes and attended to themselves.
With Giancarlo, smiling at me open-eyed, I had my rst orgasm
during intercourse.
I admit that I ran from this relationship. My defenses were falling
and I felt that I needed them. I ran away from a repeat of such
pleasure since accepting this would mean surrendering, changing
into a person who received and trusted. Children of narcissists are
afraid to be undefended. Often it takes years of various kinds of
therapy to pry us loose. But I knew a bit more about myself and the
people I was choosing. I wanted a man who would really make love
to me but it took many more years before I would try it again.
For the child of a rejecting narcissist, the route to aection is not
direct. The parent sets it up this way, saying in many ways, rst I
must love you and then the others will. The child nds himself in an
innity of waiting for his parent’s loving evaluation. Never having
earned this love, he goes on to seek it from other narcissists. It is
like a fairy tale in which you assume a golden horseshoe lies in the
pile of shit. It’s an old fairy tale that symbolizes searching for a
valuable item in the most dicult and objectionable of settings. You
think the horseshoe is in the shit and so you keep on digging. To
give up his search the grown child must acknowledge the love that
was oered as insucient due to his parent’s limitations. Knowing
this ends the waiting for his parent’s love. Seeing love fully given by
another helps dispel the fantasy of his parent’s ability to give.
An experience did this for me while I was on the Himalayan
slopes. If a mountain is equivalent to a standing person, I was at the
height of his knee when Lagkpa, my Sherpa guide, said, “We are
there.” I was happy to have arrived until he pointed upward to the
place of our “thereness,” a climb of several thousand feet. A few
hours of zigzag trekking and we arrived at a house looking over the
world through ancient dark and hand-carved shutters. The house
had two stories, with animals on the rst. I met the house’s lady
trailed by a comfortable, naked, and free toddler. I saw him have a
bowel movement on the oor which she picked up and washed
away. There were no diapers and no fuss.
Later, we all had dinner in the main room, family and friends,
Lagkpa and I, our sleeping mats rolled up and stacked against the
wall. We sat in a circle near an open-re clay stove on which baked
an enormous number of potatoes. Everyone got a triangular heap of
potatoes, which the Himalayans doused with chili and I ate plain. I
met the wife’s mother and their friends, who came in through the
door without the loud greeting of the West. Everybody seemed to t
in naturally.
The next day, I was sitting alone looking out a window at the
grandmother threshing grain on the roof of the adjacent shed. She
was shaking a straw sieve while her grandson perched in a shawl on
her back, open-eyed and looking about. He must have made a noise
because there he was sucking on her breast. She also gave him some
food from a small straw satchel After a while he was on her back
again. Both of them seemed content as I plunged into a deep
depression that lasted days. I did not know what made me sad. Now
I know it was seeing a child fully respected and loved. I had never
felt that way with my narcissistic parents, who only gave me what
they wished.
I was in mourning. Children of narcissists need to mourn the
knowledge that such a childhood will never come to us. I saw how
things can be and that my narcissistic parents could not give me
this. The same can be said of my narcissistic lovers. (This does not
include Giancarlo, my traveling companion in the Himalayas, who is
not narcissistic.) With them, it will be the same as it has been. My
wish and hope of receiving such love from them steals away my
energy. I molder in waiting.
Surrendering one’s expectation of such a full love from the
narcissistic parent or a narcissistic surrogate is childhood’s end.
There will be a vacuum in response to my need and not the kind
that nature lls. I must change the kind of person I choose to love,
which means to change myself. I must rethink what I call love.
Many children of narcissists have to struggle against what they tend
to respond to and what they will ignore. Childhood leaves its scars.
Emptiness from the past pushes us into a contemporary arena. I will
heal myself by nding love to share.
Meditation can be of use since it brings one to original thought. In
the kind of meditation I studied, you watch your breath at the
nostril until your mind stops its wandering and remains relatively
xed. Then, with greater power of focus, you can look into the
energy of your physical self.
The mind uses meditative watching to empty itself of extraneous
contents and get down to its essential substance. It uses our
attention to clean house. Everything stored comes to mind, ancient
conditioned responses, ballads, memories, and fantasies. As the
mental shelves grow empty you see aspects of your self long hidden
or discredited.
After hours of looking at endless memories and conversations,
rejections and ghts, errors committed and jingles from the radio, I
felt that I was going mad as my brain poured out these images like
discarded garbage. I watched until my thoughts began to quiet into
a mental silence that lasted seconds at a time.
In that intermittent silence, I saw a tiny baby beautiful in its
innocence and was shocked at what I did not know. It was myself
seen from a new perspective. The hatred I had learned had passed. I
saw that perfect child was me.
Psychological healing can come in many ways, including caring
human interaction, formal psychotherapy, and the creative use of
inner vision. It can come from emotional involvement with the
natural world. Healing can be an accidental outcome or the result of
deliberate intention.
Here are stories of help oered to unhappy children of narcissists.
Some felt helped and others went away as miserable as ever. The
consequences of their experience were not immediate and clear. A
person can be nourished unknowingly. But the child of a narcissist is
usually not helped if what is oered is motivated by the other’s need
to express his grandiosity by giving. Responding favorably to please
the giver is deferential behavior that further turns the child into a
cipher. Under narcissistic pressure, the owering of self is slow to
appear. Narcissistic parents think that erring is horrible. Their kids
must avoid error even at a brand new or dicult activity. The child
fears parental judgment and, to avoid failure, is stranded in the
“security” of sameness. Errors of omission are preferred.
The child of a narcissist who is ghting for existence will try to
resist what wants to take him over. He stays invisible to his parents,
whom he wants to please without acceding to their wishes. Children
of narcissists need to dare to have their own ideas and goals.
The following story shows how nature can be turned to for help.
Wild things can be our healing friends. The story is my own.
Life Among the Savages
There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her
forehead, and when she was good, she was criticized anyway. And
criticized and criticized, reshaped by her father the schoolteacher,
who, even though they were on summer vacation, never would lay
down the ruler. He prodded and shaped and examined her thinking.
“Think like a man!” he’d exclaim. (Thinking like a woman was bad?
Being female was bad?) He examined her slothful body—”Too broad
in the beam; shoulders too narrow, boyish.”
Her mother was worse; less intellectual, more basic. She strode
about in Dad’s torn undershirt, casting further shame on the state of
being female. Here, in the summer cabin, she canned and cleaned
and worked and hauled, all the while cursing and screaming and
brooding about her miserable lot; maligning Dad, who “scribbled,”
by which she meant that he was attempting to be a writer rather
than earning a lot of money by having a second job as many did
during the war years. He taught for a living and had no second job.
She screamed out her frustration at the little girl, never seeming to
notice the great sadness and the endless dribble of tears. Perhaps
both parents were like sharks, unable to resist the smell of blood.
The child attempted to help her mother but the mother refused
her while cursing the child’s helplessness. Once the child forcibly
washed the dinner dishes and the mother rewashed them right
afterward. The child asked for her own garden patch but was told
she’d not do it right. Mother imparted no womanly skills, no skills at
all in learning to care for herself or to survive on her own in the
world outside. There was no touching in this family, little holding
except for her father’s formal good-night kiss in the middle of her
forehead. Loneliness was as natural as the touch of the sun on her
bare skin.
Outside the cabin, the sun shone down and the big stream rushed
by close to the house. Frogs croaked and peeped their mating songs
and turtles made turtle sandwiches, three and four deep, sunning
themselves on the shore. Frogs leaped away at the little girl’s
approach. She, the little pariah, lived in her senses, hearing,
looking, smelling, playing by herself. She felt one with the breezes,
the whispering trees, the iridescent darning needle that landed on a
twig near the great rock. There were few children to play with and,
besides, she was afraid to approach them.
She sat and dreamed and made up stories about the world. The
wind talked and sang to her. The birds whistled and she almost
understood their message, for she knew there was one. Birds and
trees and owers knew her; they all felt each other. Especially the
huge old rock in the middle of the stream was her friend and
watched over her. Sometimes she felt scared in the shadows; darker
spirits lived there. She’d scurry past to the light. She felt great love
for all that trembled and sighed in the wind; the high grasses, the
smell of loam.
But still she was haunted by her inability to do anything right.
One day she stopped to play in the gravel pit. She found many little
at stones and began to build, not knowing what would emerge. An
apartment house of rocks, low at rooms, with roofs, setbacks, and
shadows like Hopi pueblos. There was no plan. It couldn’t be
judged. It just was. Primitive, crude, monolithic. When nished, it
had little terraces, places of sun and shade, somehow mysterious
and yet incomplete.
She went to the cabin for lunch. Her mother sullenly pushed extra
helpings on her plate which she compliantly ate; her father quizzed
her disapprovingly about some scholastic fact. Her mother tugged at
the wild, unruly hair escaping from her braids. Each was satised at
fullling their parent role in reshaping the little girl. Then she was
allowed to escape to her rock building.
And there it still sat, a little cooler and darker in the late
afternoon sun. Apart, stately, and mysterious. Suddenly she heard a
little noise. Got down on the ground, her ear to the stones. A shrill,
rasping sound, a mournful soprano letting out a little shriek. Then
many such sounds, voices singing, alone, together, trailing o and
restarting, their own rhythms and harmonies, their own language,
swelling and fading—at once a sad and joyful chorus to summer and
the setting sun. Her building was inhabited! A cricket orchestra had
moved in, nding it to their liking. She was so excited. The little
rock houses were liked, lled with the tiny creatures, telling her,
thanking her, singing their contentment, sharing her sorrow. She
had made something good and useful. The spirit of the crickets sang
of sadness, of love, of the goodness of singing together. Now she
was separate from her parents and part of the world of spirits. She
was whole.
Since I was never appreciated for doing anything right, my ego
was corroded and demeaned by doubt. I surrendered to the blackest
of moods. At psychological bottom there is no hiding in trivial
distractions. Often this opens us to visions that can take us from our
agony. The crickets were my children and I gave to ll their needs
as my narcissistic parents did not give to me.
When a person plays, the ow of the unconscious is closer to the
surface of the mind. Healing increases when unconscious and
surface touch in a ery force that liberates our energy. We need to
expose our wounds to the sun. For children of narcissists, open play
is dicult since we fear exposure to criticism and the enemy is
imagined near. If we are alone, the enemy dwells within our minds
and sees our wounded vulnerability. Wounds are defensively left to
fester in the dark, unhealed beneath their psychological wraps.
If human company is absent or unacceptable, nature may serve
since, with few exceptions, it does not beckon with false love and
then attack its lover. Things take their natural place and man can
learn to live respectfully with it. The human child, especially of
narcissistic parents, in seeing and sharing animal life learns that
there is another way.
People always try to heal their wounds but eorts can be limited
by self-protective and counterproductive defensive mechanisms of
which they are unaware. Most children of narcissists do not perish
outright under the onslaught of bad parenting but are slowed down,
bound to sticky defenses that limit their ability to change. No matter
how dicult, it is better to strive to heal. We may need outside help
to free us of constriction. Without help, we often achieve but a small
measure of our potential. We may have areas in which we achieve
competence while the rest of us is constricted by the lack of
condence our narcissistic parents showed us and we believed was
justied.
One terrible defensive outcome is to settle into an emotionally
robotic existence in which we feel neither the pain of childhood nor
the realization of life’s pleasures. Feelingless and neutral, we defer
to the parent’s prohibition of our becoming a separate person.
Neutrality is a compromise that falls between being and nonbeing.
Some of us are unable to assume a “protective” robotic niche but
cannot walk the narrow path of life. We fall further to become
insane, addicted, or suicidal.
Developing a sense of self is a dicult task and we need
assistance. How are we to know what we seek if we do not know
what help is? Parental narcissism substituted its own needs when
responding to our cry, which made our emotional situations worse.
Even though we must seek help we may not nd it. Then help must
nd us. Sometimes it does. We are dependent on the generosity of
the universe and its chance numbers. Help can come from
unexpected sources since a uniform does not a healer make. By
uniform I mean a degree that gives a person ocial status. Some
people have innate sensitivity. Many were helped and are inspired
to pass it on.
I was about nine when my father and I went on a summer
vacation to a lodge that had anti-Semitic patrons. That’s what he
told me. But why would a Jewish man want to go there with his
young child? All of his life he worked at erasing cultural traits that
he feared would bring him rejection. He spoke with the voice of a
radio announcer, hoping to pass unobserved by hotel guests. His
child was to be the same, another who would “t in.” He did not
consider me as a separate being with my own needs and feelings.
I had known his anti-Semitic criticism but not the reasons for his
receptivity to anti-Jewish characterizations. He made me worry
about my “Jewishness” and, living with him, I was constantly
scrutinized for such traits. He winced any time caricatured Jewish
features were present in anyone: singsong accent, avarice, mother-
centeredness. He did not feel bad if a Scot was smacked with his
group’s stereotype and in fact he enjoyed the person’s
embarrassment. He lived in the world of bias, secretly enjoying bias
against others and ghting o his own.
If someone asked me my religion while at the hotel, I was to say I
did not know. Fearful at living in subterfuge and imbued with
feelings of inadequacy from constant criticism, I resolved to stay
away from people. No questions and no shame. What my dad did
during the day excluded me. I didn’t think of him as I rowed down
the river and saw the beautiful water and riverbank.
There was an elderly man standing near the water’s edge. He
tended a mesh pen lled with something. I rowed over to look, got
out of the boat, and walked over. There they were, rabbits. Big and
little, white with pink eyes, babies leaning against their parents.
Like rainbows, beautiful and eortless caring. I was drawn to the
man with his pleasant smile and no questioning. He was stocky,
elderly, and quiet inside. After we said hello, paralyzing
embarrassment sent me its message … escape. I was silent. Instead
of attempting to make me talk as my father would have done, he
followed the direction of my gaze and next thing I knew, my arms
were lled with a huge friendly rabbit that snuggled into my
cuddling. I couldn’t do it wrong. No complaints.
Each day I went to him and his bunnies. He would smile, say
hello, and ll my arms with rabbits. Moments of quiet, endless
contentment. I was happy and didn’t think much. Later, my father
was too self-involved to ask me what I had been doing, which was
good. I continued. The old man accepted me without the painful
medium of words. He nourished my need for loving contact and
took me exactly as I was. The rabbit man. My rabbit man.
We are raised under our parents’ ignoring and scrutinizing gimlet-
eyed gaze, hard, divisive, and isolating. The eye ignores what is
important to us if that does not coincide with our parents’ values.
Their eyes are like laser beams, seeking out points of interest in us.
They apply concepts of “aw” and “fame” to what they evaluate.
Growing up under such a regime, one feels like a bug beneath a
microscope and at the same time a child forgotten in a dusty alley.
The glance that ferrets out and focuses on their interest, that applies
the label “good” or “bad,” pushes us into an emotionally alienated
state.
We internalize the quest for our aws and watch ourselves in an
evaluative and rejecting way. Hateful scrutiny stops us in our tracks
and turns our spontaneity to paralysis. Exploration ceases along
with performance of things we love to do or only do for the hell of
it. We constrict ourselves to get away from parental criticism.
Scrutiny, criticism, and constriction give existence a lifeless quality.
All children need the benecial glance of what I call the rounded
eye, one that does not focus on and evaluate parts of our being. The
rounded eye looks on all unconditionally. It gives us acceptance and
heals the damage of our upbringing. Points of light are those
situations, animals, people who respond directly and positively to
the child. The child may not call it a healing event but something
about it sticks. It remains in his memory and is turned to when he
feels abject despair or in need of hope. From what happened, his life
became more livable. His self-worth was seen and reinforced.
Irwin was scorned by two narcissistic parents who treated him
with barbaric sadism. They would humiliate him with the chore of
going to the bakery to buy a single, tiny roll. They liked to do this
and the salesgirl in the bakery spoke to him with scorn as well. He
had to stand aside until her “good” customers had been served. He
told his parents about this and they looked forward to sending him
again.
They may have been reversing their roles as mistreated German
refugees. Or passing on their experience of being callously handled
by narcissistic parents. Irwin’s large father would slap his son’s
backside backhand when Irwin walked by and mock him for his
complaining. Complaint was Irwin’s only outlet for hostility but was
truncated by his fear of parental violence. His father had been raised
in Nazi Germany as a victim who identied with the aggressor. He
used a titrated Nazism on his child, giving him a taste of what he
had suered in his own childhood.
Irwin was self-hating, embarrassed, and angry. He believed that
no one could share his pain. There was cynicism in his complaints
and he was beyond seeking sympathy. At home, showing weakness
caused his parents to mock him, treatment that painted its colors on
his world.
Too small and weak to say no, Irwin was en route to the bakery
for his father’s tiny roll. He fell in the street and lay there sprawling,
knees rubbing the pavement, ankle turned. Careless, sloppy, worthy
of small knocks and embarrassing falls. In physical discomfort, he
was thrashing on the ground when a man came over and helped him
up and onto his feet. He dusted o Irwin’s hands and patted his
shoulders. He wanted to know how Irwin felt and didn’t just up and
leave.
Irwin heard, “Are you OK?” and was overwhelmed with feeling.
He didn’t know what to say and mumbled, “Yes.” He felt something
stir within and wanted to escape before the inevitable harm befell
him. What if he cried? He started crying, cried and cried. Crying.
Couldn’t stop and it wasn’t over falling. Was it the back rub and the
polite and considerate questions that he couldn’t get out of his
mind? He had never been treated like this. The man waited for
Irwin to feel better, held his shoulder and said soothing words, as if
Irwin were a sensitive human being. As if he counted.
A turning point. Irwin talks about it still. He cried to learn that
there could be human kindness for him.
Selfhood is created partly out of the inchoate experiences of early
interactions between people and animals, and self-creative activities.
How do these activities reinforce our sense of being? To improve a
self mangled by rejection and improper use we have to experiment
with being. We need situations in which to practice the reality of a
self, places that reect our dreams and fantasies, where we can
behave in a way that shows who we really are and what we feel. We
need responses that support the development of our being.
We are social animals who nd recognition within a group.
Acceptance of our selves is needed to correct distorted, isolated, and
unacceptable self-images. Acceptance draws us back from self-
destruction or a solitary and unrelated life. There are various roads
to self-acceptance. If we cannot get close to people and are creative,
a healing response can come from our imagination. Creative minds
produce islands of benet.
Experiences between humans can be nourishing to the self. A
mother’s loving attention is usually more nourishing than that of a
“stand-in” like the police guard at the school crossing who is kind
and considerate to a timid child. To a child with narcissistic parents,
however, the importance of “stand-ins” can be crucial. There are
rescuers who give more to the child than does his family, who do
not see him as a separate person.
A twelve-year-old prepubescent girl, raised by an utterly critical
father, is introduced to her mother’s boyfriend after her parents
have separated. She is immature and needs her sexual self to be
noticed by a man that she can trust. Since her father has denied her
his approval, she thinks of herself as a reject. The appreciative
comments by her mother’s boyfriend come as a relief. She is uplifted
with glee when he discovers her knees and says, “When you are
older, how will we keep the boys away?” He is telling her that she is
becoming an attractive woman. Young girls discover their sexual
role from the stated reactions of men who care for them but control
their sexual impulses.
Another young girl of about six or seven, utterly rejected by her
family, is given a spent bullet shell by Roger, the psychotic boy who
lives in the building next door. He says that this bullet once took his
father’s life. Whether any hint of this is true, she feels wonderfully
admired. There can be no doubt that Roger loves her, so there must
be something about her to love.
A parent’s responses are highly valued when given directly but
the child can still be moved without immediate contact. It depends
on who is doing the expressing and why. A child receives a loving
letter from a seaman father who is gone for months. The child is
sustained and even happy with his memory.
Destructive human interactions and addiction to technology can
alienate us from our creative power. Technology means the hollow
throb of television or reams of data on a computer. Technology
turns out material that absorbs our attention and distracts us from
what we need. Denial of the inner life, its feelings, thoughts, and
dreams, separates our awareness from the inner self. If we do not
know our creative forces we can become increasingly dependent on
our narcissistic parents to give us what needs to come from within.
Narcissists enjoy the power of their position although they do not
have what we seek. Our self is denied when the parents fail to help
us back to it and ultimately we feel that there is no help anywhere.
Self must be found. Although outside reection is extremely
distorted or even missing, there are elements in it that keep us from
the most dire of endings. There is the strong biological urge to
thrive that walked peasants across continents to gain steerage to
America. There is the creative urge to weave the materials of life
into a form with which we can function. Creativity takes the
destructive threads of life and puts them together with something
from within that changes it all into what can sustain a faltering self.
Our creative mind bypasses hackneyed limited thought and shows
us who we really are. It uses the raw clay of experience to create
meaningful relations that allow us to live within the bounds of
sanity. To one who thinks herself worthless, seeing her creativity is
a shock. Where did this outpouring come from? Is there a
worthwhile self? She escapes into nonentity from this
overwhelmingly dierent image but its spirit calls her back. She
realizes that she is a person.
15
WHAT DO WE CALL LOVE? WHERE AND HOW DO WE
SEEK IT?
Love for Self, Lovers, Friends,
Employees, and Co-Workers
A huge area of diculty for children of narcissists, even those who
are professionally successful, concerns what we call love. Love is
what we search for and give to others. What we call love aects
what we look for and what we give.
We left childhood feeling terrible, with some idea of the how but
not the why of it. We live in clouds of doubt and confusion. A big
step forward is to not take total blame for what we feel. Events
occurred with our parents that hurt us even though they said what
they did was for our good. We heard that punishment was harder
for them to give than us to receive. From all our painful “lessons”
and experiences, we should know that our self-hatred is a learned
response. This will not make self-hatred go away but does give
motivation to change.
Our parents gave us negative responses. They greeted us in
temper, saying, “How awful you are.” They ignored, threatened,
yelled at us, and gave insucient touch. We echoed their point of
view and thought, “I am unworthy of love.” We took acceptance of
their view a further step and, rather than see them as rejecting,
turned their hurtful behavior into love. Scolding, forgetting,
demeaning, aggrandizing, demanding—all their destructive ways
were labeled love. In an attempt to understand and accept our pain,
we think that we have not been good enough to earn sucient love.
We grow up to seek love from similar people.
The adult child of a narcissist does not know his unconscious
love-seeking mission as he creates painful relationships. A healthy
personality does not seek rejection. The adult wonders why he ends
up with abuse. Many complain about the very thing they hold on to
and do not admit to the pleasure that it gives them. Delores has a
child who will not do what is asked of her, even after she has agreed
to do it. That is how Delores raised her and, in spite of grumbling,
what she wants.
If a mother wants her child to change, she will refuse to put up
with abuse. Delores’s child tried on her mother’s clothing in
rebellion against a stated demand that she not do so. After the
trying on, she left the clothing lying on the oor. A mother who is
sincere about her wishes would throw her daughter out if she did
not stop such misbehavior. If instead, mother pleads with daughter
to stop and secretly reinforces the abusive treatment, it goes on.
Sometimes, awareness of why we select pain can only be learned
through therapy. Otherwise our defenses keep us out of touch and
churning in the murk.
When do you think that love was given you and how did you
receive it? Do people in your adult life treat you in similar ways?
Many children of narcissists blindly repeat patterns of inadequate
loving. As adults, our childish minds, which wanted love from the
narcissistic parent, choose narcissistic partners with whom we
continue to struggle for love. This childish wish undercuts our
power of decision to move on. It keeps us on an unrequited search.
Our adult minds suspect that love won’t come but don’t know how
to break our patterns of choice. We are out of touch with thoughts
and feelings that have their hold on us. We see our habits but not
our blind spots. We can be intellectually aware of our interest in
narcissistic people but emotionally we are unable to change.
Delores exemplies this. She does not see how her boyfriend
resembles her father. She says, “He is unlike my father except in the
shape of his shoulders. They both are short and walk stooped over.”
She responds to my comment about repetition by asking, “Why
would I want to relive my father’s love since he had no love to
give?” I ask why she stays with her current man and she says that
she only likes his intelligence. Sex is horrible since he will not learn
to do what she likes, including touching her breasts. Sex is only for
him and infrequent as possible but she enjoys sleeping curled
together like two bears.
She doesn’t see the picture overall, that father and boyfriend were
critical, argumentative, violent, withholding, and nancially on the
take. I ask her to look more closely at her feelings for her boyfriend
and she explodes with, “I can’t stand him.” This is said of the man
she calls darling as she perpetually wards o his verbal attack. She
tells me that she does not like any of the men she has loved. I ask
her if she misses good sex with the current boyfriend and she says
work is the only thing that counts. Unless pushed, she stays away
from her feelings by leading a peripatetic existence like the one her
mother led with her dad.
Like many children of narcissists, Delores gets pleasure from
misery, a process that is sadomasochistic. With her boyfriend as a
stand-in, she works for and awaits her father’s unavailable love. She
walks an emotionally spiked path out of childhood. Children of
narcissists are miserable but hang on by taking pleasure in such
misery to make life bearable. The child enjoys her parent’s scolding,
forgetfulness, demands, and intrusions. Such pleasure continues to
have allure.
Here is another example of selecting a partner with whom each
episode is pleasurable torture accepted with the hope of change.
Since his self was rejected by narcissistic parents, the child of a
narcissist turns away from his self and nds its need for love
unfamiliar. The area of love is taboo and frightening. He is so hurt
that he avoids dating until emotional needs mount to the point
where resistance is overcome. Then he turns toward a narcissist who
cannot give. He takes the pain of deprivation as love or at least the
path to love.
A woman had an aair with a narcissistic man. He was very
sexual. He even grabbed her breast in a joking way when the
subway car took a darkened curve. She found love in the sexual
crumbs of their relationship. After an agreeable bout of sex, she was
lying beside him feeling spent and happy when the phone rang and
he answered. It turned into a lengthy long-distance phone call with
a woman she later found out he thought he still loved. The woman
had rejected him and the hook of desire remained. Perhaps it was
baited with the worm of rejection. A narcissist wants to be the one
who deigns to leave.
The child of a narcissist lay beside him as he talked. She couldn’t
believe the call and tried to deny it. The call would soon end. It was
impolite and…. Time went by and talk went on as she rose, put on
her clothing, and departed. He did not notice her leaving as he
talked to his “chosen one.” He had enjoyed their sex but now did
not have a icker of awareness about her feelings or whereabouts.
His attention was on the phone call.
She read love in their passion, clung to him, and hoped for change
but he did not say a word about permanence. In his sexual
orientation he was like her father, who valued female beauty and
wanted it on call. Her father handled his Oedipal attraction to her
when she was a child, along with his need for superiority, by
denying that she was attractive. He called her body unworthy,
which kept desire out of his mind. She believed what he said and
thought herself ugly, though early photographs show a pretty, wide-
eyed girl. He did not easily kiss her but held her head rmly
between two hands for a mid-forehead buss. It was like the three-
way holding machine on the head of an animal about to undergo
surgery. From her parent’s touch she got the notion, who would
want to touch me?
She was used to being ignored and submerged in her dad’s self-
centeredness. Although she hated being criticized, she associated it
with love. Sometimes she felt loved when nothing was given.
Children of narcissists manufacture this feeling from whatever
comes their way. She developed distorted notions of loving. It was a
familiar situation if her lover was not there when she needed him.
As an adult, she became pregnant by her boyfriend and wanted to
have their child. After arguing with her to have an abortion, he
totally disappeared. Although she intended to have the child, the
pregnancy ended in miscarriage.
We nd ourselves confused and hurt by what we call love and
think it a thing to be avoided. This is often the result of having at an
early age loved something that was deliberately taken from us. It is
worth remembering experiences in which our love was nipped,
when the thing we loved was removed, lost, destroyed, or turned
against us. This memory shows us that it is untrue that we have
never loved at all.
Regardless of what our narcissistic parents say, we learn to love
by loving. Narcissistic parents often frown on their child’s love for
an animal. They think he will never will love a human being, as if
the capacity for love were limited as a pie. The narcissistic parent
thinks in simple equations. If you love this, then you cannot love
that. Rather than recognize the limited capacity as his own, the
parent projects it onto his child. If his child loves lower down the
animal scale he cannot love higher up. Loving a cat means he will
only care for cats. Parental judgment is communicated to the child,
who responds by limiting the loving he feels and lling his mind
with doubt.
I remember at age eight how my kitten set it o by running up
the curtains. Also there was Smoky, my fox terrier-type dog, and
Uncle Al, the alligator who stretched out on my hand for a belly rub
and scared my grandmother with its carpet runs. I was told that all
my adorable pets must go. I defended against total loss by holding
on to Smoky, my dog friend since I was ve. We were barricaded in
my room with my dresser to the door and my shoulder to the
dresser, pressing against the screaming and pushing from the hall.
Smoky barked by my side. It was a desperate situation.
Later I emerged to see no kitten and no alligator, and no one
would discuss my loss. It was later said that Uncle Al was
“somewhere in school.” I was bereft, but at least I had my dog. I
couldn’t share what I felt. They were right. Love is risky. My parents
said that loving animals kept me from loving humans. Now I was
fearful of loving animals and humans. They probably saw in my fear
the justication for what they had done.
It is painful to lose what you have loved. The desire to love is
anked by the fear of loss. My parents blamed this feeling on my
pets. Would I want another pet? The inner parent criticizes my
need. Does loving an animal cause lack of love for people? I need to
test the hypothesis that love for one stands in the way of love for
another. I think that love breeds love. The narcissist’s love pie is
limited since he is preoccupied with self-concern. I do not subscribe
to the pie theory.
I learned from current examination of my love for animals that
the more things I love the more I can love. I see that my parents
constantly criticized the things I loved and that my fearful holding
back was learned.
We need to stay open to new information in the face of learned
negative judgments against the self. Pauline was on vacation. She
had been persuaded to go to a certain hotel that bordered on a state
park and had beautiful walks. She dreaded meeting the people with
whom she was to socialize. Versed in self-hatred, she entered the
hotel lobby and heard laughter. She thought, “They’re laughing at
me,” and wanted to leave right away. She thought, I can walk right
out this door with my suitcase in my hand.
Previous therapeutic work on self-hatred came to her mind. She
remembered that she tended to personalize unrelated behaviors and
decided to stay a bit longer, signed in, dragged herself to her room,
deposited her luggage, washed her face, and went downstairs lled
with fear at having to meet the laughers, who turned out to be
friendly. She saw her error in thinking that people would
instinctively reject her. Her rejectable self-image dissolved a bit
more. Just a bit. All of such experiences add together until it is
impossible to assume the worst.
We need to allow people to get close regardless of how poorly we
regard ourselves. We can learn from social errors. Victoria is sitting
on the dating fence again and speaking of how hard it is to change.
If she shows interest in a man, she thinks she will be rejected. Her
narcissistic mother raised her to fear men, to feel incompetent and
ugly, although she is beautiful. Victoria says, “You know that I was
toilet-trained far too early and later was a soiler and wetter. I
walked around with shitty pants and still feel that way.” I laugh and
respond with my own remembered physical failings. “When I was
young and upset or even pleasantly excited, I always had a
nosebleed. I had nosebleeds when the person I depended on left my
side, like the night I discovered that my mother had gone away for
the weekend. She had left me without explanation in the care of a
narcissistic aunt who criticized me until I worked myself into an
asthmatic t with tears. Oh yes, I had asthma in those days. No
breathing when I was upset. My nose would bleed and pour blood
all over everyone. Like the time my girlfriend Barbara was visiting.
She shared my bed. That morning we woke up in a pool of my
blood. It turned out that I had my period and my nose was also
bleeding. I gave Barbara the full treatment. Of course, I thought that
every mishap including nosebleeds cast me in a miserable light.
“Also, I almost forgot that when I was younger, I would vomit in
the automobile. Also on the trolley car. We would have to get o
the trolley before our stop. Once, on a car trip, I complained so
much about needing to vomit that my friend Alice lost control and
without saying a word vomited on me. I didn’t vomit that time.”
Victoria was laughing. My nosebleeds and vomiting matched her
shitty pants and even with such an image, I was dating! Hot on the
topic of feeling objectionable, I reminded her of how we children of
narcissists are raised to think in terms of black or white. My father
was perfect and my mother horrible. I was a genius or an
inadequate idiot, good or bad with nothing in between. I was
perfect or unacceptable. I accepted these standards in order to see
myself as a failure and so did she. Men have to make it to the upper
rung to count with us. I said, “Those who don’t meet our values are
worthless. You with your bed-wetting and me with my nosebleeds
are defensive stinkers. Who would want to know us?” Victoria
laughed again as I added, “We get rid of them rst. If I meet a man I
fall upon his imperfections.”
From Victoria came, “It is horrible that we follow such habits. We
know ourselves and do it anyway. We’re stuck.” To this remark I
counter, “We call ourselves stuck to avoid taking chances. If we’re
stuck we’re safe. One of the most healing things ever said to me
was, ‘Go out and make a mistake.’ You say no men are interested in
you but they are looking for a sign of interest. If no one comes over,
you are not sending the signal. Was your mother right when she
said no man could like you?” I challenge Victoria to go out.
Victoria agrees and adds, “All people are good and bad. Can I
accept a human being with his errors? Can I accept myself that
way? I see myself as an ugly child with shit in my pants.” I tell her,
“Go out as ugly as you feel. Me stupid with a bleeding nose, and you
with shit in the pants and insecure.” She says, “Yup. At least I no
longer have to cover myself with makeup.” Victoria had always
worn a ton of makeup. Before any of the other girls, she was made
up by her mother, who found that she had ugly “sh eyes.” The idea
of ugliness went very deep. Clearly a disguise was needed.
16
PEOPLE IN STAGES OF SELF-DEVELOPMENT
We become ourselves by emerging
from surrender to our parents’ need for us to be a certain way. We
need to develop a point of view independent of the one held by the
parents whose love we need, even if they take our independence as
a personal rejection. In the material that follows, we see the
development of inner strength from less to more, the problems,
shortcomings, and weaknesses commonly encountered. Also, we see
the unusual abilities that develop out of becoming a unique person.
Although the best judge of what you need is you, if you cannot hear
your inner voice, it might be good to seek outside help. In this light,
some kinds of therapy are discussed.
The people next depicted—Mary, Lorrie, Nick, Tillie, Alice,
Doryan, and I—are children of narcissists in progressive states of
breaking loose from the abdication of our selves. Mary has
surrendered so much that her life is directionless and miserable.
Lorrie’s surrender is less destructive in that it moves her to develop
skills that make her happy because they help others. She enjoys and
lives through their pleasure. Nick hates containment by his parent’s
need but movement toward independence is stuck in a negative and
rebellious stand. Tillie also rebels but in a way that is useful to
others by being compulsively “helpful.” Alice gives personal eort
to vocational goals in which she retains control, but does not get
close to people. Doryan has mastered his craft and gets pleasure
from a love relationship whose closeness he limits to a degree that
he can stand. The acceptable level of closeness for him is well below
average. Then there is my story, still growing and unwilling to
accept neurotic limitations as permanent.
Mary
Mary is a San Francisco girl whose defensive nonexistence excludes
regular work. At twenty-one, her life lacks commitment to long-
range goals. Nothing gets the attention that it needs. Even her vow
to be thin is an up-and-down aair whose frequent falls are torture.
Having chaotic objectives makes her miserable but she also laughs
at her constant changing as if it were a joke. She basically remains
the same, so there is psychological gain in what she clings to.
Otherwise, why would she choose to live on a low income, without
a career, with no material way to enhance her sense of self-worth?
She wanders between uncompleted objectives, impulsively seizing
and dropping goals, some of which her mother likes. Other activities
are simply done for cash, like waiting on tables or baby-sitting.
Menial jobs have replaced spotty attendance in college. In so many
ways, she is paralleling her mother’s career. Her mother was an
academic star in high school who avoided college and had
inadequate income in her early years.
Mary’s mother had a narcissistic, critical mother and an extremely
narcissistic father who demanded service and obedience. He
deplored, hit, and eventually abandoned his family. Abandonment
became his daughter’s dread event, which led her to seek dependent
lovers and to raise Mary as a clinging child. Mother’s unstated needs
run counter to her stated expectation. She is concerned about her
daughter’s future but does not require her to have a vocation. (A
lack of maternal nancial support would force the issue.) Does she
want an independent daughter or a child who will never settle
down?
Mary’s grandmother’s husbands were alcoholic and her mother’s
were into alcohol and pot. Daughter Mary followed suit with a
boyfriend who drank and was nancially dependent on her, which
made him indirectly dependent on her mother. A child ordinarily
walks the parent’s footsteps. If the parent has a narcissistic bent the
pressure to copy is strong.
Mary’s mother is angry at her daughter for not doing what she
tells her but this is only surface grumbling. Unconsciously she
enjoys her child’s dependency and disregard for feelings. Criticism
ows from daughter to mother since Mary is angry at her mother for
having problems she must copy to please.
Mother was raised to be beautiful, popular, and a good student,
but she was also full of resentment at the pressure of parental
demands without the reward of adequate love. She never found out
how much attention was enough to give or get and now her child
suers from the same confusion. Mary gives too little attention to
others and to herself. She also expects too much. Here are three
generations of women raised by narcissistic parents to be abused,
abusive, and narcissistic.
Mother does not know her proper rights. She puts up with
mistreatment and doles it out. Her daughter was raised to worship
Mother’s idealized image but one of her mother’s primary traits is
not needing or respecting limits. A trait that smacks of power can be
idealized, even or especially one that made you suer. Here is an
example of the truth that you cannot give what you have not
received or developed. Daughter respects no one’s needs, including
her mother’s. Raised in confusion, she passes it on.
Extremes of caring come up all the time. Mother’s inattentiveness
is bracketed by “spoiling.” Mary hates being ignored and behaves
badly to get attention, caring little for what others need and
deserve. The main thing is to get her needs met.
Mary is endlessly on the dole, taking advantage of people,
misusing her mother’s charge card, which was only supposed to be
used in emergency, overwriting checks, running up bills, acting like
a spoiled rich girl on a spree who will always be bailed out. Mother
is working hard and nancially only up and coming. Her daughter’s
spending sprees make great holes in her budget and bring hardship
around the bend. Mother rationalizes what she does, saying that
what she gives Mary is an “investment,” but in what? Daughter says
she will repay her mother but gives so little back that it is but a
token against the mounting hoard of things received. Mother lls
her child’s endless requests, soothing her as she once soothed her
narcissistic father by lling his materialistic needs. Copying of the
self-attentive narcissistic attitude occurs and the child becomes like
its parent. Narcissism passes on.
Last night I had a dream about the two of them. Mother and
daughter gave a party to which I came. I took o my shoes, which
they took, and soon forgot where they left them. Mother brought
out several pair of pumps, attractive, purple suede shoes which she
held up for me to see. It was unstated if I was to wear them, but I
saw that these would not t. In bringing me such shoes, she may
have been showing o what she possessed and oering me what
was inappropriate. In the same way, Mary was trained to be
endlessly on the take from Mother and not to earn her way.
I then realized in the dream that Mary had taken my handbag to a
neighbor’s house and it was missing. Mary and her mother searched
for my things but were not much concerned. There was a likelihood
that I’d have to leave without my shoes and possessions. A missing
pocketbook indicates that I was nancially abused. They acted
gracious but did not seem to care. This dream shows the self-
centered vanity of narcissism. My suering at their hands was not
understood or appreciated.
As a narcissistic duo, Mary’s tirades express her mother’s rage.
Mary’s beauty and charm express her mother’s desired image for
Mary and for herself. Mary complains about confusion and works
beneath capacity at what she takes as an experimental lark to be
dropped when its novelty wears o. She doesn’t recognize that
people make commitments after years of work. She hopes that the
star of truth will one day ll her sky and until then, she will lead an
undirected life that ties her to her mother.
But there is progress in that Mary has come to know that she is
miserable and has entered therapy, where the question of who she is
and what she wants to be is constantly asked. To this end, to
achieve a career she has reentered college. To change, Mary will
need to stay in therapy. Her mother has become a little aware of her
ambivalence over this but without therapy of her own still needs her
daughter to be a dependent child.
Lorrie
In contrast to the unhappy and withholding state that connects Mary
with her mother, Lorrie, discussed here, and Tillie, in a coming
description, are agreeable people who focus on helping other
people. Lorrie’s childhood was shaped by a narcissistic and
extremely insecure mother who demanded that Lorrie greet people
with eyes opened wide and a generous smile. She was to feel their
pain and react with sympathy, to show interest in their problems
and, before that, to care about her mother’s self-dislike and misery.
She was not to consider her mother’s self-centered demandingness
unfair. As her mother needed her, she was to be a “giver.”
Giving was to rule supreme. Lorrie thinks of giving as her natural
state. She takes feelings of inner emptiness as a sign of personal lack
from which she is to turn away and give. The more she gives, the
less she knows herself. It is satisfying to see another’s joy but this
does not answer the question, “Aside from satisfying them, what do
I want?”
She did not have sucient access to the force of early childhood,
as, for example, a two-year-old’s statement, “I won’t do that!”
Identity grows out of self-assertive events. Instead, Lorrie was
pushed into saying yes, to which she complied with forced
acceptance that sent a self into hiding. There is strength in her
ability to understand others but no increase in personal power.
Children of narcissists serve their parents and if the parents are
pleased, nd satisfaction in self-abnegation. They feel rewarded by
the response to the degree that their selves do not count. Without a
sense of personal value, they do not recognize the misery that
submissive fealty brings.
Lorrie feels the other’s plight and negates self-interest. She does
not try to know that self and thinks it not worth the trouble. Self is
felt to be distant, vague, and fearfully rumbling. As Sam’s wife, she
supports his narcissistic needs, listens to his problems, and applauds
his feats. She ignores or demeans her own.
She became very sensitive to people’s feelings because her mother
was so easily hurt. Mother always demeaned herself and needed
redeeming praise. She saw personal evaluation in all that her kids
said. They had to have the “right feeling” toward her and her
causes. Since she required them to tell the truth, it was protective
for them not to know what they felt. She would beg them for
comment, to which they acted neutral, pleasant, and unknowable.
As with her own self-regard, Mother’s remarks to her kids were
full of contradiction. She was demanding and critical, full of
adulation and disappointment. She swung up and down, from awe
to jealousy and back. Her compliments were unreliable as she called
her children good but not good enough. She even talked to me that
way about myself. “You are brilliant” she said and then asked me
about an embarrassing cyst. “What is that red mark beneath your
eyebrow?” She called Lorrie beautiful and then pulled at her hair,
saying, “Why do you let your bangs hang that way? They look
terrible.” I heard that Lorrie’s aunts found her “mature” at an early
age. She had to be mature since she was her mother’s advisor.
The sense of self for Lorrie and her brother was demolished by the
way their mother fed them. She thought that feeding them made her
a good mother and tried to make them eat. At the same time, she
revered thinness, so their not eating also pleased her. Perhaps not
eating pleased Mother more because that is what they did. They
resisted and complied at the same, sealing their lips against food
and becoming so thin that in the movies, she had to hold down their
seats while they were sitting in them. Luckily, she was not so
forceful that they were driven to assert themselves by bringing
noneating to a suicidal end.
Saying no to controlled eating could have been a step toward
independence, of which there were too few. But it was as much
compliance as assertiveness that turned Lorrie toward the rejection
of all things nourishing unless it gave another person satisfaction.
Lorrie could not overcome the guilt she felt for her mother’s reactive
pain at her independence. Lorrie’s sacricial response became a
conditioned habit. Like Nick, she said no to self but unlike him, said
yes to others. She found acceptance in supporting their plans and
pleasures.
Lorrie’s child shows the next generation reacting to parental
narcissism and sacrice. Her young son remembers what people say,
notes their needs, and makes sacrices to help. Like Mom, he eats
little and is thin. Like Mom, he asks for little and is appreciated for
that. Remembering unusual facts shows his intelligence, a value that
his dad respects. It is the brilliance of which his grandmother always
speaks. He draws with crayons, which his dad favors. Brilliance wins
his father’s approval. Brilliant is what his grandma calls him. When
sacricial and unbrilliant, he vanishes into a supportive haze … like
Mom. Overall, he features intellect, talent, few needs, much
sacrice, and a smile.
Lorrie became a psychotherapist who would not take credit for
her work. She denies therapeutic ability, showing modesty that
keeps her in line with her mother’s feelings of inadequacy. Mother
was too jealous and paralyzed to accept a child who appreciated
herself. Lorrie puts herself down and the other person up. I asked
Lorrie why she did not continue her schooling. Therapists need a lot
of it. She responded, “I am no scholar,” and added, “My papers were
only ‘copied.’ ” Weren’t all our papers derived from other sources?
She does not think of that and speaks this way to justify ending her
education.
There is a lack in her work if she tells a patient to expose himself
but she cannot take the risk herself. Lorrie speaks of her failures,
which she exaggerates. She thinks herself a beggar who is generous
with another’s money and does not know the money is her own. She
needs to know who she is when not serving another’s need.
She has talent for living in a submissive position and is used to
taking second place. She does not like doing psychotherapy with a
prison population although she may be good at it, but does not seek
the necessary training to move on. Her lifestyle has extra limits that
are self-imposed. She may be unconsciously angry at having to focus
on others, which shows in low-level grumbling about petty details.
But her philosophy pushed her to sacrice. A change in modesty
would break the role she has lived so long and might endanger her
marriage to a narcissist. All these forces come together in keeping
her the same.
Thus, Lorrie’s need for self-assertion is unexpressed. She may need
psychotherapy to dene its risks and to help her decide if these are
worth taking. But going for therapy itself means breaking the self-
sacricing mold. Till then, she goes on saying yes.
Nick
A position of strength can turn into weakness if it grows rigid and
xed. This issue haunts Tillie, to be discussed later, and Nick.
Ordinarily, when behavior that once served us is outgrown, it is
discarded. Steps toward independence follow one another. As a rst
step Nick said no to his controlling, frightening, and narcissistic
father. Instead of growing out of saying no, it metastasized against
all desire. He became a withholding person to self and others.
This is the opposite of Lorrie’s compliant yes to everything that
pleases the other person. Nick’s no deprived them and himself but
was an act of hatred whose pleasure he did not see. Being out of
contact with the deeper meaning of our actions makes us believe
incomplete or incorrect interpretations of them. Lack of self-
knowledge keeps destructiveness alive. Nick lacked proper
understanding and saw no reason for his lunacy. He called it lunacy
to be unwilling to do pleasurable and benecial things like sending
out bills for services rendered.
Saying no began in childhood to parents who were utterly self-
centered and demanded he always be on hand to help. If he failed
them in any way, they were furious. If he served them well, another
demand would follow. His father was the captain of a ship. At home
and on his pleasure boat, he would run his white-gloved hand on
shelves to see if they were clean. Nick cleaned the kitchen to pass
inspection, repaired and drove his father’s car, did endless
household chores, and was demolished by his father’s cruelty and
humor.
His parents gave him little and expected a lot. They wanted to
bask in his school achievements but gave him no desk to work on.
He used the dining table when it was free. Few of Nick’s needs were
attended to. His father’s needs always came rst. Father had a boat
of his own to play with but could not aord a bedroom for his son,
who camped out in the living room. Nick was like a serf to his
father, who had been raised like a serf by his own distant relatives.
Nick started to withdraw and withhold. He played hookey in the
lower grades and didn’t nish his nal term in architecture school.
He strolled away with a nearly A average and can oer no
explanation except, “I didn’t feel like it.” Possessing considerable
intelligence and talent, he alternately accepted and rejected his
father’s quest for greatness. Nick’s work was very good, when he
worked. Probably hatred for his parents caused him to drop out. In
later years, they boasted to guests about their “architect son,” for
which he embarrassed them by demurring. “I am not an architect.”
Nick is so much tied to dislike and resentment that he cannot see
what he would like to do. All he knows is hatred. When he went to
see a therapist, he could not speak about what bothered him. Raised
by a vain and violent father, Nick’s jaws were psychologically glued
shut and he did not learn to open them. Feelings of spite were
expressed by not speaking.
He treated his therapist as a parent gure. The fearful child
within him thought he could not speak but did not know why. Nick
also did not pay for all of his therapy bill. He said that he did not
earn enough to pay but spent money for entertainment. Hostility to
his father came out toward the therapist. Being broke allowed him
to express his need to be nancially carried, which would not
happen with his demanding and narcissistic parents. Nick did not
see the pleasure he derived from his pain.
After a while, the therapist called a halt to unpaid treatment. He
had not been able to analyze Nick’s negative reaction, if indeed he
saw it as such. Negative reaction is an analytic phrase used to
describe enjoyment of the imagined result of one’s failure. Some
people kill or attempt to kill themselves for such pleasure, reveling
in the fantasy of their relatives weeping with guilt. In therapy, a
negative reaction keeps you from getting better. You do not want to
give the therapist your improvement so that he or she can feel good
about his work. Your narcissistic parent would have boasted about
what you accomplished with his great genes and under his care.
Your need to see the parent crushed is repeated with the therapist as
his stand-in. Your therapeutic failure brings down the parent (or
therapist as a parent substitute).
Nick undermines himself but labors for his friends. He paints their
apartments and redesigns their kitchens. He listens to their problems
and drives a friend to the hospital when she has a miscarriage. He
shops for people, deriving the infantile pleasure of pretending that
he has endless funds. He helps them keep their ships aoat as long
as doing this does not interfere with letting his own ship sink. If his
friends want to do what he does not, he will not comply. His
denition of love involves a lot of sacrice and little fun.
A person devoted to not achieving is in trouble. Nick’s self-
deprivation has a tantrum quality. Living to say no and withholding
what he has to give show how closely he is tied to his parents. Far
better not to assign them so much power that their opinion shakes
him to the bone. Let them speak their minds and let him do what he
wants, whether it pleases them or not.
In imagination if not in fact, he strikes at them by surrendering
his ambition. He cannot see that what he does is voluntary. He
complains, feels sad, depressed, and miserable, but does not admit
that he chooses to exist like this. If oered a way out, he does not
take it. If his life had more pleasure, he could note the dierence.
With little pleasure and knowing the satisfaction of rejecting his
parents’ needs, he does not assess the magnitude of what he does to
himself. Chronically depressed, he goes from pain to pain in the
excitement of disappointing his parents. Their emotional state
occupies so much of his inner world that he does not feel anything
else. Parental pressures are everywhere and his self is nowhere.
If you ask Nick what he wants, he does not know. If you ask him
if he likes architectural design, in which a licensed architect must
sign his drawings, he says no. Abundant in talent and experience, he
says, “Why should I do a thing because I’m good at it?” Life is
cornered by the word no. He undercuts his parents’ ambition but
rebellion ties him to them. He upsets them by refusing what they
want. He makes promises he will not keep and no one can control
him. He is lonely but does not see that he can be closer to his
friends. He calls himself out of control.
A life determined by rejection means living on the rebound. Better
to express anger in a dierent way and be there for himself. Nick is
arrested at the stage of saying no. Pleasure in withholding keeps
him in neurotic stasis. If he were more honest with himself, he could
not go on this way. Therapy with a new therapist, also soon
discarded, brought him to a greater love of life. He sensed his anger
at his father and the role anger played in his nonfunctioning. He has
found a woman who loves him and now has married. He has grown
more aggravated at not operating for his vocational good. He has
started exercising. As he becomes more active, he is confronted by
the need to stop holding back. Although he denies the value of
psychotherapy, his treatment of therapists shows how much rage he
has and needs to deal with.
Tillie
In contrast to Nick’s self-denying negativism is Tillie’s self-denying
helpfulness. She takes a stand that runs counter to her mother’s self-
centered hatefulness. To not resemble Mother, she focuses on others’
needs. Phone calls, visits, most of her work contacts are treated as
friends. They believe this and subsequently act on it, leaving her
barely a moment for herself. Feeling overwhelmed by this, she
wants to control people, which brings her closer to her narcissistic
mother’s behavior. Growth beyond this is arrested because
compulsive acceptance does not develop into action that
discriminates between people. There is no room for needs unrelated
to giving. Tillie is controlled by the desire to be unlike her mother.
Compare Tillie and Lorrie. They are helpful for opposite reasons.
One became helpful to please herself and one to please others.
Lorrie was required to become helpful by a narcissistic mother who
revered a helper image. Tillie became helpful to be unlike her
suspicious and withholding narcissistic mother. Tillie’s
understanding of another’s misery is dierent from Lorrie’s. Tillie is
less trained in sacrice and not as accepting of their weaknesses
since it reminds her of the state in which her mother tried to raise
her. Since both are therapists, which one is more helpful to a
patient? It depends upon the patient’s need. Most of all, a patient
needs a therapist to be free of blind spots, the compulsion to be and
do. To the extent the therapist does not know if she is trapped, the
patient will suer. Both Tillie and Lorrie have signicant blind spots
about themselves and in similar ways will be blind to their patients.
Compare how Tillie and Nick oppose their narcissistic parents.
Tillie’s opposition takes a positive approach and Nick’s a negative.
To foil his narcissistic parents, Nick says no to all desire. Tillie ghts
the control of her narcissistic and paranoid mother by compulsively
saying yes.
Tillie’s mom thought she could see right through people. She
looked for evil and found it. Tillie found her mother utterly self-
centered, someone who used people to her advantage. When
Mother’s picture is taken she shows her knees. Not that she is
sexual. Sex is used to snare and hold a man. She superstitiously
made preteen Tillie sit bare-breasted in the sun to develop breasts so
that she could later catch a man. Mother had many odd illusions,
which she imposed on her children. Tillie’s older brother told his
mother everything about himself, which later ended in her attacking
him. Brother’s tears alerted Tillie against such sharing. In this
family, Mother suers and the child takes the blame.
When Tillie moved out, Mother saw rape lurking everywhere and
would call to see if she had survived. Mother tried to keep control
and thought her judgment best. She panicked if her child was not
home by a certain time. Tillie saw her mother’s negative slant and
decided to be utterly unlike her. She would accept and trust all. If
someone needed help she gave it. If people behaved suspiciously,
she saw them as worthy. Once she found a wallet lying on the street
and asked the person standing next to her if he owned it. “Of
course,” he said and took it from her hand. Tillie’s power of
judgment was suspended by her need for innocence. Her mother
was close to no one, including a seventy-year-old husband, and
saved money for the time that he would leave her. Tillie was close
to all, attracting them with smile and wit. She encouraged their
demands and lived in a state of exhausted sainthood.
By not looking at her needs and disappointments, mistreatment of
self continued. Her boyfriend promised a trip that never arrived. He
described a dreamy future on foreign shores but did not work for it.
His brilliance was in the puery of speech. Nothing materialized to
support his schemes. She was not supposed to criticize him and
didn’t. He promised her great sunsets but wanted her to show him
love by living in his bedraggled mess, which she could ignore or
clean. For him, showing negative behavior tested her love. For her,
loving him without limit disproved her mother’s hatred of men.
Tillie’s new strength of acceptance turned into weakness since her
positive comments were not tied to awareness of what she felt and
knew. She was unrealistically positive, a Santa Claus gure. One
day, we were eating in a restaurant when a woman came over
whom Tillie hugged and complimented. Later she told me that she
could not remember who the woman was. This idea made me
anxious. I want to be loved by her as a friend because I am known.
It upsets me to see her so free with her hugs. She once told me that
she thought me cold until she read some of my writing. I do not
trust her proigate intimacy. She gives in an undiscriminating way.
She is popular, but what does it mean if she says that she cares for
me? Compulsive acceptance evades true intimacy. Intimacy is a
matter of choice. Her mother avoided intimacy through suspicion
and she avoids it by being all-embracing.
She was locked into “doing good” when a new profession started
to shake her loose. It was psychotherapy with “clean” addicts and
their families. Being able to tell them the truth has to start with the
self. Looking at her Pollyannaish approach birthed a new and fragile
phase in which she tries to know and care for herself and worries
whether this is narcissism. Counseling addicts keeps the pressure on.
She needs to be free to make decisions if she is to help codependent
mates break free of the compulsion to please their addicted mates.
Living to please another is codependent, even if it is undertaken
by your own choice so as not to resemble someone else. Tillie
cannot help an addict to leave a self-destructive path if she destroys
herself with indiscriminate giving. She has to struggle with this
since even a preference for one thing over another causes her alarm.
If all is not equally good, has she become a rejecting person? Is she
like her mother if she does not live to please?
It was a sign of her growth when she felt conicted about a guest
who stayed for the weekend. A sloppy and angry person, he left his
unwashed dishes in the sink. Tillie washed them and later said to
me that doing this was not good for his independence. She thought
of the damage done to him but not of its cost to her. The prospect of
not being self-sacricial is contaminated by the memory of her
mother’s selshness. It is hard for her to put herself rst and to
think it acceptable.
In terms of development, she has her toe on the next level, where
she can allow herself to be a real person with likes and dislikes,
choices and preferences. At our last meeting, she spoke of the self-
destructive behavior of her boyfriend. She no longer feels
responsible for his fate but nds it hard to watch him destroy
himself by inches. Harder still to stay in an exclusive relationship
with one so destructive that she nds him physically unattractive
and does not want him to ll her sexual needs. It would be good to
remain his friend, perhaps to speak of her concern for him, but at
the same time to nd an appealing boyfriend who is not dependent,
a man whom she wants to give her sexual pleasure.
Alice
Alice buries herself in her work and generally has a nonexistent
social life. She may date on vacation but otherwise has “no time or
energy” for it. She once dated a weak-willed man who liked her to
be in command. Although she did not enjoy his personality, his
weakness did not threaten her. It was years before she tired of
knowing him, when feelings of boredom led her to end the
relationship. She feels safer practicing social distance. She would
rather dominate a man and be bored than accept her mother’s fate
of being overwhelmed and controlled by a narcissistic husband. Like
many children of narcissists, she sees no other option than those
practiced by her parents.
Between boyfriends and for long periods of time, Alice stays
alone. Social avoidance comes from an estranged childhood in many
countries, since her father constantly changed jobs. Both parents
were critical of any problem in their children and did not support
Alice through the anxiety of meeting new schoolmates and teachers.
Contact was doubtful with a distant father who acted her superior.
Mother was a frightened, hysterical woman who complained a lot
and found her children’s needs a burden. Alice avoided both
parents’ disapproval by focusing on schoolwork.
One time, in a Catholic school assembly, she was pushed around
by a nun who bore down on her for an unknown crime. When she
told her parents about this, they did not take her side. From such
treatment, she came to expect disloyalty and to mistrust love. As a
grownup she is often silent while others converse, which drives
them away or causes them to chat without addressing her. She fears
that her speech will turn people against her and in fact often has a
confronting tone like that of her father. This resemblance shows awe
of his authority as well as years of repressed fury that by
identication with him turned her submission into a bossy
commanding facade. Isolation is the safest way to go. The only
person with whom she feels safe is her sister, a person who she
thinks understands her without speaking.
In her rst psychotherapy, she said little and departed in a year or
so, almost as unknown as when she entered. This therapist respected
her defensive constriction. In a more recent psychotherapy, when
lacking an external problem to discuss, she is at a loss for words. If
her therapist tries to discuss her closed-o state he is met by
misunderstanding. She feels attacked by his questions and responds
with rationalizations, arguments, and tears. She cannot be objective
about her silence because it oers her protection. Years of
defensiveness have brought her to the defense of denying her inner
life. She is not committed to marking a path to where she hides, let
alone to changing her route to safety.
Alice needs to become acquainted with her inner self. She has too
long shut it out in fear of social censure. She needs to know her
anger, of which she has an abundance. She also has to know her
need for love. Living with so much anger and fear, she is not much
troubled by social needs and stays away from thoughts that would
reveal them to her. Much of her aection goes to animals and to her
sister. That Alice was expert at attacking her parents to get them to
support her siblings is no reason to think herself hopelessly
unlovable. Personal change will mean knowing her fears and then
what she desires. As with most children of narcissistic parents, she
has the undertaking of nding out what holds her back.
Doryan
If you become a slave to refusal, you are glued to rebellion and
unable to nd out what your self needs. The people described thus
far live mostly for or against another person. Let us look at one
whose growth went further and turned him toward his self. Doryan
broke free of the narcissistic mold to follow his own mind. When I
asked him, “What special strength came out of freeing yourself from
your narcissistic home?” he said, “To nd out for myself. Never to
accept anyone’s word on an issue. To break through to my own
understanding.”
More than most people with narcissistic roots, he makes it on his
own. He serves many but needs few. His strength goes out to public
issues. His weakness is hidden in his private life. He is very strong in
his public actions and somewhat limited and weak in private. In all
he does, he is an individual. He is ruled by the need not to submit to
outside pressure.
He was raised in Europe by narcissistic parents who told him
what to do. First there were parents, then governesses and tutors,
then parents again. He shrank from all, looking through the eyes of
his camera. He wrote plays and studied lizards and bugs. Developing
an inner world was necessary for one who was subjected to what his
parents thought of as “the best.”
One summer, when he was about fourteen, Doryan visited an aunt
and uncle who were vacationing at a northern European lake resort.
There were too many people for his pleasure so he climbed into a
canoe and paddled o. The more he paddled the quieter the shore
and the more beautiful the scene. This trip brought him joy and
launched him on a search for wilderness. His family did not much
protest his move since he had a mountaineering uncle who
explored. Uncle modeled activities that his parents did not nd
altogether strange.
In his teens, his area of expertise was acrobatics, at which he
worked to overcome a small and slim stature. He was one for trying
to win any contest, although competitiveness did not mean that
much to him. It was a way of existing. Still, disappointment came
from receiving unfair treatment. Like being rst in a language
course and seeing the reward given to a lesser student who was
older and therefore thought more appropriate for the prize of a trip.
Or when his mother promised him a spendable sum for an excellent
report card. He studied hard and got A’s, except for singing. She
held back the prize because of his grade in voice. He felt cheated by
this and his studying ceased. When he found treatment unfair, he
would stop his activities. He was able to withdraw, a good defense
against the invasion of narcissistic parents. All this led him to be on
his own.
His parents talked Doryan out of studying biology so he entered
engineering. Due to family pressure, he was in his junior year at
high school and engineering school at the same time. Aside from
this, he resisted. He knew he had to make a living and the rest was
up to him. He paid for boat rentals out of limited earnings and was
a student between exploratory jaunts. At age eighteen he emigrated
to the United States. Education went on. So did voyaging. His trips
went farther north until he traded canoe for kayak, a covered boat
for bad weather and blustery water. He made voyages down rivers
never mapped and became an expert on survival. He catalogued the
Arctic life, its ora and fauna, the religious shrines and bones of
those who were left behind. He rested his eyes on wild things in the
natural state, like butteries with hairy wings in the Arctic summer.
He tried not to disturb animal life and carried no weapon except
for a wasp spray, thinking that a gun gives too much superiority. A
wasp spray had not been used against the polar bears but he
assumed that they’d take notice if he sprayed their sensitive noses. A
bear once stalked him while he was sitting on a rock waiting for his
plane. Since the trip was over, he had put his gear away, including
the wasp spray. The plane arrived shortly before the bear, which the
people on board had seen but he had not. They were wild with
excitement as they pulled him into the plane.
Wanting to be the animals’ witness and guest, Doryan would t in
as he never could in his parents’ narcissistic home. He did what he
could without mechanical help and was sad at being physically
small, which led to further development of strength and special
skills. He did as much as anyone, if not more. It was his mind, not
the facts, that called him too small. The child of a narcissist is
always too small for them. Doryan went where only rare beings can
go and survive. He developed hardiness and scholarliness with a
keen mind that harked to the simplest of elements. What he did
with his energy is helpful to the world of exploration and
preservation.
Doryan leads small groups by kayak to the rare beauty of that
desert we call the Arctic. He gives lectures about exploration and
lowers his voice when he walks with people in the wild. He gives
lessons on how to t in, looking at stems and roots to see how
things grow through time, witnessing the cracking of stones under
ages of freezing and melting. He has the gift of being in nature that
comes to one raised in submission to the throne of a narcissistic
family.
He is a man of strong mind who tries to understand and will not
be led. He does engineering for a living but nature is his love. He
has amazing biological knowledge and his thought is penetrating
about natural things. It changes when you get to his topic of fear,
the emotional why of human relations. He is uncomfortable and
puzzled when I ask him why he does something interpersonal. In
nature he sees a multiplicity of causes, things meshing and
progressing out of one another. In viewing his self he avoids the
emotional determinant. He is socially undeveloped, avoiding the
intimacy where others try, fail, learn from their mistakes, and try
again. He says that his parental home and his marriage, which was
painfully unsuccessful, were too upsetting to want another
“experiment.” Instead, he focuses on his interests and keeps his
distance, even from his kids, hoping that he will be loved as he is,
deeply loved but not seen too often.
He says he does not suer emotional consequences from his
physical mishaps. He only asks what he can do in response to such
crises as a freezing spill into an Arctic river. Like the Möbius strip,
one of his favorite forms, his thought has no top and no bottom, no
beginning and no end. Möbius is a twisted gure, like the symbol of
eternity. Like a Möbius strip, Doryan must be taken as he is.
Does he miss his lover when they are apart? He told me that he
does in the protective pain of his heart’s isolation. He feels empty
without her but if he thinks about what is missing, his mind is too
divided and frightened to change. He will not test closeness, seeing
if he is as weak as he fears, as weak as he was with his narcissistic
parents. He sticks to his freedom and must be alone. He gets
together with his girlfriend as a break in his “important aairs.”
Then he goes away and there is little sign for her of an ongoing tie.
She feels very cut o when they are apart. He does not hesitate to
have many women friends and some casual lovers. All are a means
of reducing intimacy with the woman he loves.
Constant breaks are his protection. In therapy he became able to
say no to his widowed narcissistic mother, who had a stranglehold
on his emotional life. He moved out of her apartment and left
therapy with the closeness issue unresolved. The therapist oered
intellectual information to him but they formed no emotional tie. He
says that the therapist admired Doryan’s ability to live through any
diculty and stand it alone. I think he has always stood alone.
What Doryan did not hear was the weakness side of this equation.
What he gave to his children and now his girlfriend is his
emotional “max.” He is afraid to delve into self-knowledge more
deeply. He lacks motivation to change and calls himself too old. He
now has reached seventy but has the resiliency of an arctic explorer.
What if they get together and “the experiment fails,” which then
will leave him without his friends. He talks as if an eligible man is
ever without company. He has many excuses that are constantly
changing … too something … young-old-poor-busy to try getting
close. He fears the extremes of closeness and distance. His fear of
closeness with people verges on the phobic. What if his lover or
friend gets a narcissistic hold on him? Freedom is his primary
concern. When asked who his friends are, he says that he has few,
but mainly associates. His closest friend is his girlfriend.
This child of a narcissist gained strength from freeing his physical
self from narcissistic parents but still has troubling connections with
them. He fears that the power his parents had to run his life will
reappear in the one he loves and she will take him over. His
intellectual life has so much interest and value that he wants to live
with his deciencies and not to change himself further. He is afraid
of getting close to a woman because what if he grows old in the
relationship and then nds himself alone again. This is partly a
rationalization. A man can usually nd new girlfriends. The
associations which Doryan enjoys do not have the pains and
pleasures of an intimate love aair.
In closeness, this intrepid explorer is ruled by fear. One cannot see
his future. Currently there is insucient motivation to change,
perhaps because his fear is too great. Let us hope that something
will nurture his roots and cause him to grow, that motivation will
come. Overall, he is a man of rare achievement and strength grown
out of the struggle to separate from constricting, narcissistic parents.
Elan
An idea about changing the self is slow in rooting. Not being
narcissistic does not mean that one should be a slave. For the
narcissist there is only self. For the normal person, there is self and
other. If we were not born only to serve or take, how much care or
self-care is reasonable and how much do we need? Strength comes
from considering you and me. Weakness consists of being trapped in
caring for only one or none.
The struggle we take to achieve identity is an interesting one.
After childhood with narcissistic parents we need to follow our
instincts. These lead us to our selves and teach us that it/I exists.
Mundane approaches imply following other people’s rules, a
practice of which we have had enough. Wanting to develop, our
struggle often takes us down unusual paths.
Self-development is dicult if the sense of self is undermined.
Where and what is that devalued self? If we are overly discouraged
we lose the desire to look and try, fall to a low level of despair, or
hang out in neutral and are unknown. We go to extremes of
conformity with or rebellion against another’s opinion. As a youth, I
was too confused to do anything but conform, but lacked a clear
image of what to conform to. My narcissistic parents were rebels
and attacked anyone else’s thoughts and ideas, including each
other’s. For example, one said cut your hair, the other said grow it.
One said I read too little, the other said too much. When I
complained about loneliness, my father said I cared too much for
people, etc. They did what they thought was right regardless of
majority opinion and often were in mutual opposition, which made
my position even more confusing.
They said, “Resemble me,” but opposed each other and neither
gave a clear image to follow. My father wanted to be the more
omnipotent one, the chief, but his image was vague. My mother was
so unique and clear that I lacked the courage to be like her even if I
felt that she was right, which I did not, having been taught to
disapprove by my dad.
I did not know what I was supposed to become. My appearance
was generally “wrong,” but what was right? I begged for a fuschia
satin jacket like the one worn by other kids but my father was
opposed. He said that I was not supposed to resemble “them.” What
should I look like? When my mother opposed him and bought the
jacket, I already felt so dierent that it was more like a disguise
than an outt that joined me with the others. At a time when
adolescents try to look alike and hang out together, I felt and looked
the oddball and hung out alone. When the girls stayed together, I
accompanied the boys and vice versa.
Kids want friends but my father insisted that one friend was
enough. I accepted this since I found making friends so dicult and
had been raised to feel the outsider. I entered college feeling
hopeless, especially in the face of so much company. Adding to my
shock, the college looked upon my supposedly low ability with
favor, which made my depression worse. What if they were only
fooled and later saw the real and inadequate me?
Success drove me to therapy, especially being made editor of the
school magazine. I could not live with the inconsistency between
their image of me and mine and dropped out of editing. I graduated
and, after oundering for a while, went to graduate school in
clinical psychology. While this went on, another part of me was
developing while I studied about and traveled in Asia, which I
describe in Chapter 14.
In the part of Asia where I resided, every woman wore a skirt that
covered her legs. I hiked in trousers, but when living in a village
wore a calf-length blue cotton jumper with a long-sleeved white
blouse. It was commonly worn, distinctly Tibetan, and handmade.
When I returned to the States, having been away so long, I wore it
still. I felt at home in my Tibetan dress, having grown accustomed
to it in a place where I was more accepted than anywhere else, a
mountain home where I could leave my wallet unmolested on the
trail.
Asia is good for a person inquiring into who she is. Asia has more
to do with manifesting the inner self than does the outer-directed
and self-conscious West. Outside Darjeeling, I lived in a house
shared by people who were studying Tibetan meditation. My
mountain friends included Tibetans who had sat through three
years, three months, and three days of isolated meditation. They
had wonderful humor. I remember their laughing over diculties
that would have made me cry, like the time we gave them an
increase in beans to improve their protein intake and they stood on
line all night waiting for the latrine.
After Asia, I had to learn how to t into society without
abandoning my emerging sense of self. I had to determine what was
important and gure out how to preserve it. I returned to the West
in my classical Tibetan robes and was told that I looked like a
Chinese aristocrat of the fteenth century. To me I looked nice.
After years of passive acquiescence, I had entered a stage of self-
assertion. Looking unusual did not make me want to change my
dress. I looked like everyone in the part of the world from which I
had just come. My outt was a step into independence.
I took the assertiveness of dress further. Between the times I wore
my Tibetan dress and mood, I began to wear miniskirts with shnet
stockings. I hated my job, which required I learn computer
programming and insurance math for a stodgy insurance company.
The complaints I received about my stockings barely registered
above my anxiety and annoyance with computer math. Flow charts
were used to delineate my weekend. On them appeared oce tasks
as given by my boss “Alphonse Cohen.” I gave him the name
“Cohenballmaus,” my way of showing his quest for power and
underlying timidity. This timidity did not stop him from ring me
because I still wore my shnets. They knew from my dress that I
would not t in. I knew from my math that it was so. Still, I learned
from this that one does not need to dress to proclaim originality. I
also learned not to work at what I hate.
Strategy was a new concept for me. I had been raised to believe
that my father could read my thoughts and that nothing I could
think or do would change his mind. After much discussion in
therapy of my dress, I recognized when I t in and when I stuck out.
From the way people treated me, I saw that I could be more
outspoken if I dressed in inoensive mufti. I was beginning to stand
for what I believed in, but not to be compelled to cause unnecessary
trouble.
Years later, I seek the original because it pleases me. I don’t feel
compelled to be dierent but prefer it. I have some of the strength
that was nourished by my struggle to be free of the dominance of
narcissistic parents.
The next step in psychological growth has to do with knowing
what can be changed and how to ask for it. It has to do with not
staying with what does not satisfy. The child of a narcissist is often
hungry and waiting. We need to break our identication with the
parent and not attempt to change what cannot be changed. If what
is oered is insucient and unchangeable, move on. Life is a
classroom. We are left back until we understand the lesson. There is
always a more dicult lesson ahead.
Helpful Approaches to Change
A sense of self develops from interaction with people and from
deeds that set you on the road. A person trips over his feet and
laughs to discover the error of his ways. Do you know what you
need and what you have to oer, what you can and cannot do? Are
there people who rely on “inadequate” you and seem to enjoy it?
We can feel hopelessly confused, wonderfully good and horribly bad
at the same time since the parent put our ideal image on a pedestal
and our ordinary self in a ditch. If we throw caution to the winds
and do the best we can, we nd trying to live up to the narcissist
image of being a perfect person to be a waste of time.
All this has to do with knowing our buried selves, so far out of
range that sometimes we feel nonexistent at the core and strangely
empty. Are we centerless and dierent from other people? Can
something unfelt exist? Can a self grow out of emptiness?
Psychotherapy can be very helpful, but what we call therapy can
come from ordinary people who see, hear, and feel us. It comes
from friends and relatives, from fortunate encounters with strangers
like the Rabbit Man and the man who helped Irwin to his feet.
When we are afraid of doing something lest we fail, we meet
someone who loves the doing and shares it. To have such experience
we must take the risk of doing or at least of being around a doer.
We think that our families’ ways are the only ways and then we
meet people with entirely dierent values. Like a Korean family of
acupuncturists that has so much joy in helping others and an
outrageous sense of humor. From the happiness in their voices and
the pleasure in their eyes, you know their way is good.
You think that you are odd, for example, in your sexual
preferences or in what you call love. Your parents always treated
you that way. Then you attend an art show that features what you
think of as horrible and a host of self-accepting practitioners are
represented. You realize that you have overreacted and misjudged
yourself and that staying in isolation brings misunderstanding. The
greatest source of hatred for yourself, regardless of what others say,
comes from you.
You think that you are without value and are driven to write it
down. It turns into a story that you read in a writing group. People
talk to you about it and your writing. You begin to see that there is
a valuable life inside.
Formal Psychotherapy
Since the reecting mirror of our mind is stained with our parents’
views, how can we see ourselves? Where and how can we see
ourselves at all? We need a reliable mirror in which to look, to be
accepted as we are to achieve a sense of being. For many, the
therapist is the one with whom we rst can be ourselves. The
therapist should be a reasonable person free of pressure for us to
achieve his wishes and fulll his values. He should be one with
whom we can disagree.
Group therapy is often useful. In group we show ourselves to
others and learn how we aect them. Out of our terror, we learn to
speak our minds. We start to feel our temper. Always having heard
our parents’ distorted opinions, foreign perspective is helpful. We
learn that we can dier and go on.
After hearing their responses to us, group members seek our
wisdom in return. We nd that we have identities of our own. We
recognize that not everything we do, especially what we have
learned from our parents, is socially useful. Our notion of
narcissistic perfection crumbles. With growing awareness, we can
oer useful comments and feelings. We learn that there is someone
inside us.
At times, we may think that the therapist is mistreating us in
narcissistic ways. If this is our transference, it shows the experiences
that a grown child carries from her past. Transference means
experiencing and having feelings about a current person in the same
way that we did about an important person in our early childhood.
Although the resemblance is illusory, transference causes us to
relive ancient expectations, wishes, feelings, and attitudes and oers
the opportunity to examine them and to change them if needed. Of
course, it is only transference if the therapist is not narcissistic.
Narcissistic parents say that we should be perfect, and that they are
entitled to a form of worship. Such concepts paralyze us. What if I
do something and do it poorly. Is the therapist criticizing me? Or is
it me thinking that it is in his mind? I remember my personal hell of
tennis lessons, agony to be a beginner. I imposed my feelings about
the situation onto myself, confusing the “it” of my practice with the
value of my being.
Self is not the product of a propaganda machine. It has its own
needs and identity. If never felt, self’s arrival can give a shocking
jolt. For years of therapy, I wept over all the things that I was
missing. The world would never accept me with my “small” brain
and breasts. My narcissistic parents had declared me unable to love
so I saw my cause as hopeless. Psychotherapy helped me look at the
facts as well as my dreams and fantasies. In my current problems I
had been reliving the issues of early life. I began to see my neurotic
expectations and to stagger over blind spots. Therapy opened my
eyes so that I could look another way.
I looked into my memory of the past. Had there been any freedom
to be myself? Inside my head, I hear my father attacking my need
for independence and hating the therapist for presumably being
against him. My memories oer more to me than this—many of
them are sad, some of them are hopeful. They show me what I care
for. A narcissistic parent often applies restraint before his child is
capable of understanding. It is hard to distinguish what was
introduced into an atmosphere that always existed. You tend to
think that is the “way it is.”
Many think they should deliberately replace the parent’s views
with a new, untested image but this is covering self with another
false identity. To avoid false identity we should not bury our
emptiness under rocks of nonbeing. How are we to know the self
long buried, so far out of range that we feel nonexistent? Can a self
unfelt exist?
For me a great jolt came after years of expressing unhappiness in
therapy. I was talking about something when emotion welled up
inside me. My therapist interrupted what I was saying to ask me
what I felt. I spoke of it with confusion. I did not know what it was
until he called it love. Imagine my joy. If I could feel love then I was
lovable. Years of declaring myself emotionally void were at an end.
17
LEARNING TO RELATE TO THE NARCISSISTIC PARENT: THE
WAY IT IS AND HOW IT CAN BE IMPROVED
We need to stop acting like sponges to
our parents’ negative opinions. They will try to push us in
narcissistic ways but what they tell us need not determine how we
feel. We are demolished by such comments if we accept them as
valid and take our errors as signs of inner worthlessness. We feel
guilty for rejecting their view of us if we think loving them means to
believe all they say. We need to see ourselves as we are and not the
picture that our parents paint of us. If in some ways we t their
negative descriptions, that behavior can be changed.
If we want to be treated in a dierent way, the change in
treatment must start with how we present ourselves to them. This
problem was present in full glory during a weekend country visit by
my father and his wife. I again experienced what narcissism can
make me feel. Not having seen each other for months, he greeted
me with his standard opening, a negative aesthetic evaluation. This
approach was one that lled my childhood, an approach in which
body and mind were on trial.
Stepping over the threshold, he went into his act, holding me at
arm’s length for a physical reading that was characteristically
negative. He frowned at me and said, “Your eyes are swollen. You
look tired.” Already a double dose of what my doubtful self-image
didn’t want to hear. I responded with, “I stroked a cat and probably
rubbed my eyes. I’m allergic to cats.” This oered him a new
beachhead to conquer. “You should have known better than to do a
thing like that.” His tone and words implied that I was stupid, weak,
and thoughtless. To some extent I took it. It is hard to be sensitive
around a parent who always rubs in your problems.
I defensively changed the topic to my strength. I was responding
to his judgment as if it carried great importance and was indirectly
ghting back. “I am going on a three-mile run. Will you join me?”
To this his guns took a new position. “At your age, make it a mile
and a half.” Did this cautionary note apply to him or me? Narcissists
often confuse identities with their children. “Can you run three
miles?” I asked again and he returned to, “At your age …”
Having to announce the distance of my run shows that his
comments hurt me. It would have been healthier to have run and let
him have his opinion. Being oversensitive to critical comments is the
frequent weakness of children of narcissists. We can work on our
hypersensitivity by seeing who does the judging and by knowing
that everyone has shortcomings.
I don’t like being treated as a puny child and can’t stand negative
opinions because I haven’t suciently separated my self-evaluation
from the critic’s. In this context, my analyst told me a story about
Charlie Parker. His band expected him to come and play but he was
too drugged to get out of bed. Finally they went to get him and
dragged him to rehearsal. He sat there in silence while the band
played through many of his choruses. Finally, he lifted his
saxophone and played a single note. A narcissist would have
disregarded that note—
“Worthless without …”—but a famous musician who was present
said, “What a note that was.”
I see how I was overly defended because I did not know the
proper response to their demeaning comments. My father’s wife felt
too weak to assist with the luggage so I went out to help carry
things from the car. I had his typewriter in one hand and a bag of
vegetables in the other, to which he said, “Give me that. It’s too
heavy for you.” I held on and moved away, half inviting him to
wrestle. I walked o, feeling more the weight of his judgment than
his luggage. He followed me with acerbic comments. “You’re as
crazy as my ninety-year-old father was.” Grandpa was big, a man
known for religious pressure but very kind to me. I would join him
at prayer in a tongue I did not know. On the harvest holiday, we
would shake a lemon and a sheaf of wheat. He was Russian and
always kissed me hello on the lips. This man I loved.
Linking me with a man both ancient and decrepit is supposed to
make me weak. But does his putting me in his father’s image make
me weak? Dad is feeling old and passing on the trait. Then comes
the narcissism of his wife. I enter the house with their luggage,
change into my sweat pants, and am ready to run. His wife is sitting
on the couch and looking at me hard. She seems to have become
more like him when she says, “You aren’t skinny anymore.” She is
alluding to the great amount of weight I lost while recovering from
a concussion. Her tone is not complimentary. Weight is a point
about which I am vulnerable since I used to eat compulsively when I
felt self-hatred or depression. Once you are fat, you always feel fat
regardless of your size.
The sequence of events during this weekend shows me why I
overeat. “I wear a size eight. Do you think I’m fat?” She says no and
retreats from an argumentative scene. In the back of my mind, I
know that she has a problem with weight. Her daughter is very
skinny, as are her daughter’s children. The family seems to share a
need to be thin. She has focused even more on weight since her
recent gain of thirty pounds. Trying to get her to take it o, my
father verbally attacks her for every extra pound. He clings to a
controlling and judgmental position.
I tell him, “I’m ready to run. Would you like to join me?” He
holds us back, embarking on a lengthy search for the right kind of
shirt. Then he joins me for his walk-run, which I accompany,
kicking high in the back to make up for our slow pace. He talks and
I see more deeply into why he speaks to me in a demeaning way.
“Can you imagine an eighty-three-, almost eighty-four-year-old
running like this?” It is narcissistic to change his evaluation of aging
to suit himself. His father was crazy to act strong at ninety but he is
terric for running at eighty-four. Praise to him and blame to me.
He is more critical of me because his self-esteem is low. Aging is
hard for the narcissist. Some of my annoyance dissipates. But
annoyance is not the entire story. The criticism that was given stays
with me and has its eect. When he slows down to a walk and turns
around, I take the rest of the distance in a solitary run.
When I get back, I invite my father to go for a swim, to which he
responds, “Invite a man of your own to swim.” I answer, “Sorry I
invited you,” but should have said, “I shall have one as soon as I am
ready.” My father increased my feelings of loneliness in an
unresolved situation with a boyfriend who needs a lot of separation.
Father’s lack of sympathy arouses my pain and embarrassment.
Later he adds, “That man treats you as his concubine. He sleeps with
you but will not take you anywhere.” I have been very unhappy
about his keeping me from the doings of his active life. But then
again, he sees his kids and grandchild rarely and has no close
friends. He lls his life with acquaintances and socially useful work.
Still, my father’s words sink in and misery replaces the memory I
have of many happy hours my boyfriend and I have spent together. I
forget that he often says he loves me, and it is true.
Later that week, there is a telephone argument with my mother in
which I tell her that something she has done resembles what my dad
would do. Being compared to the man she has divorced and hates
drives her into a temper. She writes me a letter in which she says
that he never paid a cent of the agreed-upon child support and that
she was too proud to ask him for it. She says that he was demanding
and inattentive to her sexually, far more concerned with his own
satisfaction than with her pleasure. She only found real satisfaction
years later with a boyfriend. She summed up with, “Your father
treated me like a concubine.”
There is that word again and it was independently introduced. I
see that my father attributes to my boyfriend his own view of
women. They are hollow, tubes for him to invade with his organ
and his words. No wonder he used to say that the best woman was a
Japanese geisha. A geisha is a beautiful and delicate woman who
serves men while walking lightly in paper slippers.
I saw the eect of his criticism of my appearance in my behavior
the following day. I was overeating to damage the beauty that they
denied me, enacting the inadequate image that both of them
projected. Overeating had troubled me in previous years. Now I saw
some of the reason for its being. I overate to show respect for their
criticism of my weight. If I want to help myself, I can refuse to
please them by becoming what is not good for me.
I also was troubled by my father’s evaluation of my boyfriend and
brought the issue to therapy. My therapist said, “Your boyfriend
loves you as much as he is able but not enough for you.” The
therapist is not implying that my needs are too great in general, but
only for this man. I hear his words and understand, but as soon as
the session is over it starts again, my feeling of despair at not being
loved.
Like many children of narcissists, I automatically gravitate toward
the negative. Long demeaned by our parents, we feel hideously
unworthy if there is no one who loves us and in whose love we
believe. Without love to contradict the parents’ message, their
opinions and treatment rule how we feel. I told my therapist that his
pointing out how unloved I felt made me feel hopeless about my
ability to benet from therapy, to which he responded by further
showing me how I caused myself pain. Belief in my parents’ view
makes me feel unworthy of love. In support of this belief, I take my
boyfriend’s limitation as evidence of my unlovability. I act as if he
could give more love to another woman and twist unrelated
information to use against myself. My father’s words are used like
an emotional knife that I thrust into my heart.
If I accept my parent’s vision of me as unworthy, I will have
trouble getting along with him. On this weekend with Father and
spouse, criticism is adding up to a heap that infuriates. When his
wife says that she cannot stand this country place because there are
no people to do things with, I respond to her in a narcissistic way,
an error that adds re to re. I criticize her inability to spend time
with herself. Acting narcissistic is a common failing for children of
narcissists. The parent’s desire to control me brings me to try to
control them in the same way. I say, “Why don’t you use the time to
paint? You always say that is what you want to do.” She angrily
responds, “I need a teacher to help me do it,” and I come back with,
“Why must there always be another person in everything you do?”
In sharing their critical technique I make the habit stronger since
my doing it means that this approach is OK.
I remind myself that what they say is only an opinion. Children of
narcissists are surprised to see that their parents do not t the image
of a superman or superwoman who won’t repeat an error (or make
one in the rst place). Belief in the parents’ “perfection” makes it
hard to generalize from known limitations. It is better to know our
parents’ fallibility. Then their negative words do not sink so deep.
My parents talk of happily married people and advise me to follow
suit. Divorces and unhappy marriages come to mind so that I can
think, What is wrong with living the life that I think suits me?
If I want them to talk to me in a nonnarcissistic way, I will have
to do the same to them. I could have responded to his wife’s
complaints about loneliness with, “When I return from the city, I
would like to see one of your paintings.” This is a request and not a
command. A proper approach has no accusation. It supports a
voluntary spirit. If she paints, it is for her pleasure.
My therapist told a story that exemplied not being swept into a
competing ego trip. In a band all but one of the musicians were
playing very loudly. To “achieve balance,” they wanted the soft one
to raise his volume. He didn’t like it loud and lowered his volume
instead. The band grew angry but could not make him get louder.
Instead, they had to lower their sound to achieve balance.
We need to learn how to get out from under parental pressure
without declaring war. After years of criticism from a narcissistic
family, children accept what they hear and are plagued by low self-
esteem. We grow older and develop independent ideas, but still fall
prey to doing what our parents like. Then we get stronger still and
are sad, mad, and no longer willing to tolerate manipulation. When
they tell us who we are and what to do, we y into tantrums and
counteraccuse. Although we rebel against what they say, this
reaction shows that we are not autonomous.
I had many angry moments on my parents’ visit, which showed
that in some way I believed their opinions. When his wife asked if
she could hold a family party in my house, she was pleasing my
father while bringing inconvenience to me. Knowing of my
emotional distance from these narcissistic relatives, she was going to
get us all together and pour on the glue. Because her party would
interfere with my work, I said an angry no. Later, I realized that if I
had felt less threatened, I could have said, “Do what you like,”
joined the party for a while, gone for a run, and retired to my room
with my ears plugged against sound to work.
How do I feel about my response to them? Overall, too sensitive. I
see how I learned to hate my face and gure and that it is hard for
me to treat demeaning remarks as comments to be evaluated.
Trained to feel inadequate, objectivity is a hurdle I will have to
practice jumping. My father is as fallible as any. When I am hurt by
what he says, I must have forgotten this.
How to react to unacceptable comments and suggestions? If you
are inured to inherent attack, say in a friendly tone, “Interesting
opinion; I shall consider it.” Consider it in your own time and when
you are ready. If your parent demands agreement now, say that you
need time to think it over. Do not be bullied into agreeing in order
to still his or her insecurity. Do not defer to critical manipulation by
projecting a state of awe. An attacked child cringes, cries, argues,
and feels inferior. Outgrow this and treat criticism as a suggestion
you will consider.
Give what is said the respect you reserve for any kind of
comment. Do this even if you are hypersensitive. If you want to
agree or disagree, say what you will and let your comments rest.
Avoid combat no matter how unruly or insulting the response. Your
life does not depend on other people’s opinion of you. Children of
narcissists are so much criticized that they accept criticism
everywhere and train new people to speak to them that way. But
criticism should be stopped as early as possible. Destructive
criticism is not a pattern to encourage. If an older child or adult
cannot accomplish this in his family home, he needs to move out as
soon as possible.
Practice noncombative rmness. Do not support a critical
approach by falling on your knees. If you hear remarks that cause
you to worry, seek outside evaluation. You may need to change
something but don’t want to feed the critical method a meal of
grandeur. A narcissistic man criticized everyone because his
approach was never stopped. He was told fty thousand times not to
criticize but criticism remained his calling. If reprimanded, he
would say, “I’m sorry you took it that way.” Nothing stayed his
tongue.
An eective way to deal with compulsive criticism is to ignore
what is said. Do not fuss about its put-down quality. The compulsive
critic relies on your attention to feed his ego. If you remonstrate,
argue, deny, feel hurt, you show that his comments hit home. Such
a reaction to one who needs attention keeps his technique alive.
When we train an animal, it repeats behavior that it thinks will
bring reward. If there is no response to what it does, positive
reinforcement is removed and the behavior stops. In the same way,
bland indierence takes the weapon from a critic’s hand.
Sometimes the attack is too much to ignore. In families of
narcissists where criticism is favored, there are unspoken tenets of
behavior, like: “He who wields the knife is powerful. If I tell you
what to do, I know more. Smarter is better” and “I raise myself by
putting you down.” I was raised under such an onslaught and was
too often hurt to shrug it o. Children of narcissists can develop
emotional soft spots from parental pounding. We are like tenderized
veal. Criticism keeps hitting home because we believe what is said.
Children of narcissists have been pounded into belief. Our parents
know our sore points because they originally created them.
If what is said is objectionable, goes too far, or is said too often,
we may need a more active approach to eliminate this critical
behavior. Humor is one of the most eective and harmless ways of
teaching. Humor does not have to be of the ho-ho-ho kind. It can be
an event that stops the attacker cold, like showing by gentle
comment and question that he is ill-informed about something you
know quite well.
Take your parent’s insistence on publicly criticizing you. You feel
humiliated and unable to stop her, which may call for “heroic”
tactics. This can be humor of the outrageous kind that takes courage
to eect. One who succumbs to his parent’s tongue does better if the
humorous scene is rehearsed. You are going to make it impossible
for the parent to continue without self-humiliation. She will see you
as a person not to mess with, one who can interfere with her
manipulations and tricks.
A father plagued his thirty-ve-year old daughter for not
marrying. He disapproved of her lifestyle, which he thought
reected badly on him. He had just married a social climber whose
sons were engaged to “model” females with page-boy hairdos,
polished nails, up-to-the-minute clothing. They had the look that
was “in” at the time for upwardly mobile yuppies. This made him
insecure, ashamed, and determined to reform her by rubbing her
nose in her “embarrassing” condition. His way of life was devoted to
reforming people. He began discussing her unmarried state while
driving a car full of people, including his wife and two stepsons, on
an elevated driveway near the water.
His daughter was waiting. He raised the topic like a sledge
hammer, pounding nails into the plank of her being. She had asked
her analyst how to get out of victimization, being grilled,
embarrassed, and wrong. He told her to do what she would never
have dared without his advice. It was a piece of theater that used
her parent’s values. Her shrink was a respected man who had helped
her before. His script would oer her father a lesson.
Her father was launched on her marital condition. Why was she
not married and at her age? What of her loneliness, etc.? He
regarded his point of view as the one and only way to be. Her
stepbrothers looked at her reaction. She did not think it then, but
they too put up with plenty of criticism from him. She felt
surrounded by criticizing enemies, drew a deep breath, and pictured
the vulnerable position she would soon be in. In her mind, her
shrink said, “Do it,” and she did.
“Dad, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long
time.” “What?” he said, with mounting sadism in his tone. “I’m gay
and I shall not marry.” Her father didn’t know the truth, but was
thrown by her lack of propriety. The car swerved a little. She had
been heard by the class of people he wanted to impress. He would
have unabashedly pinned her for living alone but gay was
something else. Gay lost him points with his audience and a
narcissist is always trying to score on image.
He snorted and swerved the car, too anxious to ask more. “You
can’t be,” he sputtered into his collar, to which she said nothing. He
dared not pursue it. I am not using this story to demean
homosexuality. It is only an example of how to use an atypical point
of view or one of the parent’s weak spots to lay the narcissistic
attack to rest. Her tone was friendly and then she was silent. It was
his decision whether to continue discussing marriage.
The narcissist did not admit that what she said hit home. That
would entail a loss of face. Deep inside, what she said pertained to
him. It is dicult for a narcissist to give a sign of change. If you are
looking for change writ large, you should go to someone else. A
small but signicant change not directly stated was that he did not
again discuss her unmarried life in front of other people. Perhaps, as
was said to me, this was a big victory after all.
Narcissism is a tale of codependency. The codependent person
cares for the person who abuses some kind of drug. The
codependent has her arms wrapped round a person who has his
arms wrapped round his drug, be it alcohol, cocaine, fame, power
over people, money, etc. If the abuser is narcissistic, his arms are
wrapped around his image. From his defensive isolation, the
narcissist demands that his codependent child get vicarious
satisfaction from the parent’s pleasure in self. The child hears what
is wrong with herself or about her and her parent’s “greatness.”
Otherwise the child is ignored and must be happy that her parent
can have an admirable and independent image. In the parent’s
philosophy, his child cannot say no.
Insensitivity was shown by a narcissistic father who, despite his
ex-wife’s death two weeks before, sent his daughter a Xerox copy of
the letter he had mailed to the local newspaper without its being
published. It concerned our nation’s unnecessary expenditure on
items of war to shield us from “Red” enemies while vital services in
the country fell apart. Disappointed by the newspaper’s lack of
response, he asked her for a reaction. Not a word was said about the
loss of her mother. She did not answer his letter, for which he
undoubtedly blamed her.
Children of narcissists are confused about what is fair to self and
parent. They need to develop such judgment, but how are they to do
it? It helps to talk to friends and to observe relations between
nonnarcissistic people. Psychotherapy may be necessary to get the
stuck engine of self turning. A grownup’s desire to lean too heavily
on his child, while pitiful, is not fair. The narcissistic parent is
needy, which makes his child feel guilty for withholding. But the
child should not surrender to pressure that he go beyond his means
and reason.
I remember wondering who and what should be the recipient of
my care. My analyst set me to thinking about it with a mythic tale.
He spoke this way because he knew that I would overlook the truth
of direct comment. Children of narcissists are trained to ignore
reality and to stick to their parents’ rationalizations. The analyst
wanted to circumvent this by entering my spirit through
imagination and the unexpected. His tale was tough to swallow. It
lingered in my mind for months and years. It is with me now.
A mother bird was able to y only one of her four babies at a time
across the ocean. She put a edgling on her wing and said, “When I
am old, will you y across the water with me on your wing?” “Oh
yes, Mother,” said the birdie out of love. Mother took this baby out
over the ocean and dropped it in. She went back for her second and
asked the same question. “Mother, I love you so much that I will
save you then.” The second birdie followed the rst into the drink.
Mother dropped the third one to drown for the very same response
and approached her fourth. Asked what this birdie would one day
do when it was grown and she was old, it answered, “Oh Mother,
forgive me. I love you so much but when I am your age I shall have
my own young to carry across the sea.”
This baby was carried to the farther shore. It is natural to support
rst ourselves and then our young. It is not our wish to turn our
parents down. We want them always with us but should not
sacrice ourselves and the next generation to save our parents’ lives.
It is our obligation to look ahead.
This biological perspective contradicts the narcissist’s demand for
primary position with everyone. He stars in a psychic play with only
one character, who is looking in the mirror. His child does not have
the time or energy to supply what the parent’s decient system
needs. The child’s energy must go to his or her own future, which
includes the lives of his children. Like all grownups, the parent must
x himself. Narcissism is a sickness and a weakness. You, his child,
can be angry at the lack of love received from him and can bypass
rage to feel compassion and regret. But his problems require expert
help.
We get along better with the narcissistic parent if we stop living
by his opinions and his rules. As a child, I backed down from what I
thought important, to please him and avoid attack. I did not want to
be associated with something he thought wrong and undermined
myself to win approval. For example, my father kept saying that the
math I couldn’t understand was easy. It made the matter worse that
every lesson with him was lled with pejorative comments.
Rather than investigate my diculty with numbers, my trouble
with one and two, I was told, “You are stupid,” and “Math is easy.”
Accordingly, I acted stupid and got the lowest marks in the class.
How stupid I must be if it really was so easy. I remember receiving a
15 on one test. I always thought that I would fail but sometimes
concentration surged forward out of fear and my work improved
dramatically. It was strange to get a near-to-top grade on a test like
the New York State Regents exams, which kept me from failing in
class. Afterward, I would sink back into obscurity with a teacher
who would scratch her head and wonder who I copied from.
According to my narcissistic parent, except for math I did well in
school because I somehow faked intelligence and bought my
teachers o. Actually, I loved to read. Aside from this I backed
down and kowtowed to him in the deepest way, acting out what he
thought of me.
Seeing him as correct, I was dragged into the lowest of moods by
his assessment, which considered my problems disastrous,
inevitable, to be cured only if I followed his advice. Years went by
and his negative pressure started to get me mad. But anger is not a
nal step. It shows that my expectations of him were unrealistic. A
narcissistic father phoned his child to say that he read one of her
newspaper articles and it was not good enough. At the same time,
he said that she underestimated the magnicence of his
contributions to the world and to her. Such comments were familiar
intellectual pap for her to eat. When they stopped talking on the
phone, she exploded into well-chosen epithets.
Her response showed a combination of strength and weakness. It
was a strength that she didn’t feel too constricted to admit her anger
and didn’t need to try and back him down. It was a weakness that
she expected something dierent from the critical/superior message
she always got from him. She thought about how to handle future
situations in which he would want to evaluate her work, since his
comments undermined her. She lacked sucient perspective to
disregard them.
Her analyst suggested that she let him read her work but ask him
to make comments only on paper. She was to tell him that she
would not attend to any criticism of her work that was verbally
communicated. When his notes would appear, she privately knew
that she could le them in the garbage. Of course she would have to
enforce her rule with him, and narcissistic parents will often try to
slip one in. They are power-hungry and self-righteous about their
“giving” you what you “need”—the image of superior judgment that
makes them speak. Also it is hard for a child not to read a parent’s
notes since she is always waiting and looking for his positive
response. She has not yet decided to deprive him of reading her
work but does know that telling him to stop criticizing her will not
meet with success. He has already been told this innumerable times
by many people.
What do we do with our anger toward them? Anger has a healthy
side if it puts us on the road to change. Tillie was raised to smile
and conceal her anger. Negative emotions were treated as
undesirable by a mother who ruled and was obeyed by everyone.
After years of analysis, Tillie feels good about expressing mild anger
at her mother’s provocation. Such expression makes her feel free
and she enjoys its heat. Anger expressed is better than being a
Goody Two-Shoes.
Sometimes, though, we hate ourselves for getting mad. We think
that we should be beyond such response. Nick was angered by his
parent’s self-centered drive and attacked himself for feeling angry.
This demand showed he has narcissistic values that can’t accept his
imperfections.
Unrealistic expectations and consequent disappointments keep us
unhappy with our parents. If we understand that parental
egocentricity is based on feelings of inferiority, narcissistic
outpourings can be heard as notes upon the wind. If our narcissistic
parent repeatedly disappoints us by claiming to possess more value
than he has, anger comes until we understand. A therapist spoke
with humor of their posture when he said, “How reassuring it is to
know that in our changing world, the narcissist remains the same.”
Review your understanding of narcissism until it automatically
appears in response to your parent’s controlling words and gestures.
Once you can disregard such behavior, you may get in touch with
your feelings of aection. Where does this love come from? In early
childhood your parent felt some love for you. You walked and
talked together. He tickled you and shared the butteries interposed
with criticism and intermittent unavailability. Little things mean a
lot. From such moments grew love that lives on despite the
clamoring of your anger and your need.
As you grow more realistic and see your parent’s blocks to loving,
look for fuller loving from a nonnarcissistic person. Raised with the
narcissistic version of love, it can be a lengthy process before you
know the kind of love you need. It is dicult for many children of
narcissists to expand their denition of love to meet their decit.
Perhaps you have changed and want to get together with your
parent. The issue of your change comes up. In the past, you always
did what he wanted but now your own interests are precious. You
do not want to return to your formerly empty state by subscribing to
the parent’s call for replication as if you lacked identity of your
own.
You want to spend time together doing something pleasing to
both of you. Since you once shared an early life, it is unlikely that
you have no interests in common. State what you would like to do
and hear her response. If what interests you is unacceptable to her
and what she suggests does not appeal to you, try a second idea and
a third. Keep proposing until you nd something that appeals to you
both. Compromise means nding what suits you although it may not
be on the top of either list. If she likes history and you like
museums, go to a museum that shows historic events. Each loses
and gains a bit.
Giving in is dierent from compromise. Giving in has the spirit of
surrender in which you please the other by disregarding your self.
The narcissistic person stages a scene of temper or grief. Feeling
frightened, guilty, or oppressed, you give the squalling person what
she wants. You give, but do not want to do so, in order to get the
relief of her calming down. Such pacication is not compromise
since the prots go a single way. Trying to create a bargaining table
with the narcissist can lead to strife since listening to you as if your
needs counted is new for her. Fighting takes two people. In your
new way of being, a self can be rm without a ght.
The child of a narcissist who is used to pacifying his parent feels
the hopeless longing that addicts and codependents label love.
Addiction is a longing that is never satised. Becoming real by self-
expression brings the possibility of receiving a dierent kind of love.
You will be loved for who you really are. The narcissist hopes that
others subscribe to her view even in their silence. Hearing your
viewpoint and giving it weight makes her feel demolished. This is
the narcissistic illness and why she must be lonely. Arriving at a
mutual decision will not be easy for her. She must learn that sharing
the power of decision will not objectively vanquish either one of
you.
Once you arrive at a mutually acceptable choice of activity and
are on your way, there will be less pain, although the narcissist will
still feel some. Her own parent disregarded her real self, which is
why she allows no one to get close. Now you, the child whose love
she needs, introduce the necessity of there being two people and
viewpoints again. She fears to be discarded but you cannot fully
solve her problem since it needs psychoanalysis. Your goal must be
limited to nding an activity that is pleasurable for you both. If
none is found today, look for one another time.
In getting together, it is good to know the limits of your relating.
If you want to improve how you get along, do not underestimate its
diculty. Rather than revert to a submissive state, and knowing
how hard it is to change, be progressive in your demands. Go from
easy to hard. What are the expected problems? Each family is
dierent. In my tribe there are compulsive talkers, know-it-alls who
parade knowledge and leave no room for you to speak. You are
supposed to fade away and look interested. If you enter their
monologues and disagree with them, their speech will cut you
down.
If your parent is a talker, establish ground rules that stop
interruption. He is not to interrupt you and you are not to interrupt
him. Interrupting is a psychological way of killing the speaker.
When you are interrupted, let him speak until nished and then pick
up exactly where you left o until your thought is completed.
Eliminate interruption until you both can converse in relative
freedom.
If he wants you to share an activity that only he enjoys, and a
narcissist commonly believes his choice to be the best and only
desirable one, the child part in you will want to win his praise by
acceding. You cannot regularly do this and be thought of as an
autonomous person. Instead you need to gently indicate disinterest
in the activity and to underreact to hurt feelings he expresses in
response. Sympathy for his feelings is not surrender. Explain what
you would like to do and keep looking for what you can share.
The child of a narcissist can fool himself into expecting a dierent
parent and then be driven to distraction by what occurs. Do not fall
into such fantasy. If what he wants to do or discusses is of little
interest to you, change the topic to what interests you both. Such
change is not as destructive as phony talk in which you secretly die
of boredom. If the narcissist is a compulsive talker and you do not
like such verbiage, avoid a meeting that allows for endless talking.
You do not want to battle against his need for an ear.
Don’t be shocked by continued narcissistic arrogance. Appreciate
what you can but don’t lie. It is possible to point to his strengths
without treating the narcissist as a god. If he puts you down,
jokingly put yourself lower. I don’t always put myself down, but
sometimes doing it exposes the competition behind the criticism and
thereby disempowers the parent. Don’t complain about his acting
powerful. My analyst gave the example of trying to make yourself
bigger by getting on another’s back in a deep swimming pool. The
person beneath goes down but the person on top is no higher.
Limit your time together to how much you enjoy. Set time for
nonconversational activities, a play or concert, a walk in the woods.
Your parent may also need to remove herself from your talk and
demands. Do not overrun established boundaries. She has not often
respected your personhood. It will be hard for you to state your
limits and for her to follow. If your needs clash and your boundaries
are overrun, go with the limit of the person who can take less. It is
like Jewish law about a window. If the one who needs it closed is
weaker than the one who wants it open, the window is closed. You
do not want to injure the weaker person. Defer to the one who
suers. It is easier to meet again than to generate frustration, and it
takes a lot of knowledge and discipline to keep it kind.
How much time together is pleasurable? This can change with
time and become less or more. You learn by observation. What do
you do about the lack of positive response? Many say that we
should not expect a damned thing from the narcissist, but this is not
possible or necessary for one who is her child. There is love for both
of you. You learn to love by separating the wheat from the cha.
Love appreciated means not asking for the kind of love that the
parent cannot give. And vice versa.
You will have a kinder relationship if you do not have to defer to
and buy into each other’s images. This gives you the freedom to
develop compassion. Set it up so that what you do together oers
opportunity to feel. You may be surprised at how little love there is.
Or how much. The more you support her faltering self, the more
you will know the love she brings. I know a parent who led a self-
centered life. In his eighty-fourth year, he told his daughter, “You
are the center of my life,” and it was true. By seeing the parent’s
limitations and fears, we can allow ourselves to feel the love we
have for him.
18
SENDING HOME THE NEGATIVE INTROJECT
How do you confront the negative
inner parent when it attacks you? How do you get rid of it, refute its
hateful message, and make its inuence less destructive?
It is as hard to end this book as it is to acquire self-appreciation.
Children of narcissists need to learn to discriminate, not to absorb
every negative opinion and directive that comes our way. Once we
were too open. Then we reacted by moving toward total closure in
defense. Closure leads to boredom and deadness. We need to nd a
middle ground where things can enter consciousness and be subject
to evaluation before they are accepted as a part of our being. We
need not absorb what we don’t nd valid.
It is dicult for us to nd the middle ground. We were raised in
extremes and do not know the middle. When life is easy, the middle
is easier to establish. When life is dicult we need to work to nd
it. It is the struggle toward this objective with which I end this book.
The negative introject is partly the voice of your attacking and
restrictive narcissistic parent whose thinking took up residence in
your mind. It is not rightly a part of your self but a hostile foreigner
that watches you with a critical eye. Little escapes its quest for
control. It criticizes you with such comments as “You’re a failure”
and “Why try?” Your feelings of depression strengthen its force. It
makes you discard appreciation and distrust aection. Its punitive
demands and paralyzing arguments stop you from trying to change.
We want to please this uninvited judge that sounds so much like
our narcissistic parents. We succumb to its messages, the thoughts
that we hate and almost believe. We want to reject such miserable
input but lack the foggiest notion of how to do so. We resentfully
accept its presence as a fact of life.
My negative introject entered the scene a few hours after a phone
call from my esteemed agent to tell me this book was sold. Up I
went in mood and spirit. Hours later I arrived home and my feelings
started shifting strangely. Soon I was depressed. It was as if the
depression had come from the sky but actually it came from the
attitude of my negative introject. I was anxious and despondent as I
questioned my ability to do the work. It was as if the person who
wrote the rst half of the book was a million miles away.
My negative introject said, “You’ll never nish the writing and
will be humiliated, marked as a failure, a tragedy, a landmark of
shame.” I felt pummeled by this. It seemed to make sense. My
hopeless mood was evidence of my worthlessness. With a note of
triumph, my introject said, “That is you.” Later, while brushing my
teeth, despondency drew me to memories of childhood. I felt
asthmatic shortness of breath and wheezing, something I had not
suered since that era at times when I was emotionally abandoned,
stressed, and pressured. Being unable to breathe was the physical
aspect of my emotional horror. It was amazing to have an attack on
the day I heard about selling my book about children of narcissists.
The negative introject squashed my feelings of success and raised
fears of humiliation. Achieving and then losing again can be more
painful than not achieving at all, which is why many children of
narcissists do so little. Barely functioning defends us from loss. We
were taught to feel responsible for fate rather than to do what we
can and let results fall as they may.
Don’t be discouraged by this tale. It was not a total loss but
showed the response of my introject to achievement that took me
above my expected level. At that time and totally discouraged, I
could not laugh. After a period of emotional hassle, I laughingly
resisted the introject’s attack on my commitment and returned to
work. When we measure the achievement of a person, we need to
know her past, the place from where she has come.
I heard my introject’s call to failure. It said that I would not be
paid for my work, which part of me believed while the rest of me
pushed on. I heard my healthy side saying, “The gods can have their
way after you have nished.” I am happy to have written this. It
represents the triumph of my self.
A house divided, children of narcissists must struggle to exist.
They ght with their negative introjects and feel trounced on and
wearied by its endless attempts to suppress their eorts. They
receive its directives as punishment or correction and are led into
hopelessness. If undermined, they accept messages that read like
poison. The power they give to their introject makes it hard to
eradicate.
I increasingly identied with my goals. A measure of health is the
state of your self. Self and health are one. Strength came from
sharing insights with other children of narcissists. Working on the
book directly involved loyalty to my self. Could I do it justice when
continually undercut by my negative introject and by narcissistic
outsiders who focused on potential negative reactions? My worried
self still drove me to think, feel, and write. Never had my
personality and self been so close. My operations and feelings were
as one. Wonderful to feel myself being.
In repeatedly silencing my introject I learned more about the
struggle. Eradication takes deliberate thought and eort. You need
to identify the introject as foreign to your self. As long as we think
of it as ours, we are at a disadvantage. If we see it as a non-self, an
identication that drives us to unacceptable roles, feelings, and
behaviors, we can work on it. Labeling it as non-self is dicult
because we unconsciously see the introject as an aspect of our
narcissistic parent. What do we do when loyalty to the parent
opposes loyalty to ourselves? We have been trained never to put self
rst. The narcissistic parent would call us selsh.
Sometimes we think the introject a part of us and sometimes not.
The introject feels strong, then weak, then strong again. Outside
circumstances aect it, as does therapeutic examination. Group
membership and individual therapy help. Logic attenuates its form
and negative circumstances bring it back. The battle can last a
lifetime. But it needn’t.
This attacking and foreign agent rst enters our realm when we
are babies and need our parents’ love. If they are critical and
narcissistic, their disapproving eye and angry mouth start hurting us
from within. As we grow, the negative introject imposes states of
limitation with which our self disagrees but is trounced by it and
imprisoned. The introject wants to be top dog and, unlike a
conscience that leads to reasonable comfort, it removes security
from the self. Despite its negative eect, a childish idea that this can
lead to love glues us together. Parent love was slow in coming but
we knew no other way to get it.
An adult is sickened by his introject and thinks it harmful. He
wants to set himself free but nds it hard to do. He may be unaware
that his child portion clings to childish ways and ignores the
consequences of such attitudes. Childish expectation can be hidden
in the unconscious and only detected by inference, for example in
the content of our dreams.
You are bemused and anxious about what you do. An extra
portion of cake, the important job undone, choosing an unloving
lover. People dominated by negative introjects blame it on the stars.
They treat their introject’s pressure as a joke and ask, “Why am I
doing this?” They follow its instructions to fail, surrender
responsibility, and admit that their child self is in charge. “You
know me when I …” They speak as if they are inhabited by an
external control. They suer from repetition but do not mark their
behavior as addictive, which would obligate them to try to change.
Since their problem is addictive, they indulge in childhood needs
and pleasures while their adult lives fall apart. They say “somehow”
and “maybe” of their intentions while staving o adult needs,
responsibilities, and expectations.
They indulge in childish behavior stemming from the unstated
wish that this will cause the narcissistic parent to love them. All
people have childish wishes. To realize our potential, however, we
must stand alone and face the fact that the narcissistic parent cannot
now adequately meet our childhood needs any more than he or she
could when we were growing up. If we stick to childish behavior,
we will continue to inhabit a dreamland of wishes and illusory
expectations, addicted to the unrealizable desire for the narcissistic
parent to meet our needs.
The introject uses our parent’s values. If he or she is narcissistic,
such values cannot lead the child to happiness. We do not know that
we were propagandized into many of our beliefs, which makes them
hard for us to know and surrender. It takes more than introspection
to see them. We need the input of friends, therapist, therapy group,
people who share similar battles but who are not bound by identical
constraints. These others are also puzzled by the working of their
unconscious. All work at depleting the negative introject’s power.
Therapy groups are usually not exclusively formed for children of
narcissistic parents. But most groups help in multiple ways. In
group, you nd out that you are not the only one with a hideous
self-image that was put in place by endless parental demands for
change. The narcissistic habits that you manifest will be responded
to as objectionable in no uncertain terms. Group therapy bypasses
the social inhibition against expressing displeasure. Some group
members would are up at me when I took an all-knowing and
commanding position toward their behavior. Inwardly insecure, I
had no idea that I sounded like my parent in speaking as I did.
Then there were friends. One was Hal, a Viennese gentleman who
also attended graduate school in psychology. He was a lover who
reminded me of my physical beauty. Of my small breasts he would
say, “More than a mouthful is wasted.” He helped me with my fear
of statistics and when his ministrations were over, this child of a
narcissistic got the higher grade.
He had an outrageous sense of humor that appeared in a series of
photographs he took of me in my despair. In one photo, we were on
vacation in Provincetown and I was lying on a rock jetty, pummeled
into hopelessness by my introject. He lovingly called it, “Golomb
gives up.”
He would cry with me from sadness—his, mine, and ours
together. His had to do with being a refugee from Nazi Germany
and losing his family, especially his beloved cousin who had set out
for Israel never to be seen again. At times Hal would act like a
robot, a mechanical creature that walked with a jerk and
increasingly lost control, which thrilled and scared me as it
woodenly followed me around mumbling inanities. He was acting
the role of a person who had completely lost his ability to feel, a
common defense for people who have gone through the horrors of
war. In actual fact, he had many feelings, some so strong they
scared him.
Together we adopted Ee, a dog that became my friend for life.
Ee was the name taken from my own and given to the doll I most
loved. By six or so, I had washed the doll, which stilled its voice, but
I loved it just as much. My parents intended to buy me a “better”
one. No one asked me if I wanted to hold on to Ee, that extension
of my self. One day I came home from school to nd that Ee was
gone. A new doll with Toni hair did not still my grief. It was one of
the many moves they performed which said you have nothing and
no place to call your own.
Hal helped return to me the spirit of what I had once loved and
missed. He took joy in the dog’s personality. We both had so much
fun living without having to prove or be something dierent. He
shielded me from my parent’s narcissistic opinion. When things
appeared dire, he never gave up hope. For the rst time, I was with
a man by whom I felt accepted.
Do negative thoughts lurk at the back of your mind like uninvited
guests? Such ideas can be so habitual that you do not think them
strange. In freeing yourself, it helps to be funny. “You here again?”
Humor cuts the power of oppressive ideas. Laughing, you can see
that you don’t believe in everything you think. It is good to tell your
self-demolishing messages to those who have similar problems or
who can enjoy a good joke.
Sometimes you listen too long before acting. The introject gets
hold of your mood and outwits your common sense and humor. If
you can’t politely back o, continue on your way despite inner
criticism. Reason and will can keep you going till you get support.
A time of need can open you to the negative introject. My
negative introject had been quiet for a while when a catastrophe
brought it back. At age forty-seven, I had gone for a bike ride that
led to an accident in which I injured my head. Local hospital X rays
showed two concussions and a small fracture of the skull. This
hospital would not treat head injuries and told my parents to send
me to another hospital. Instead of my parents explaining to me what
was happening, I found myself strapped to a stretcher and against
my will was carried away in an ambulance. I was terried, resistant,
and they knew it. I have a long history in natural healing and
wanted to see my Chinese herbal physician. But my parents were
too scared by the doctor’s story to tell me what was happening and
acted in a typically narcissistic way.
In fear and over my protest, I was taken to the second hospital,
where I received the medication I did not want. The right to make
decisions was taken from me and given to my parents. They allowed
the doctors full control of treatment and ignored my endless
requests to be removed because the doctors had implanted fear of
my demise.
I would have done it otherwise but had lost control over my
medical treatment. I call it “medical” but in fact the only medicine I
received was tranquilizers. I wanted to leave but was literally tied
down and drugged. I was always kept tied, since the hospital knew I
intended to leave. I was tied neck, wrists, midri, and ankles, except
for the few hours that my mother visited and would untie me
against hospital disapproval. She never could believe that I was
otherwise kept tied and chose to think it occurred ve minutes
before she arrived. However, my unhappiness, anxiety, displeasure,
and sickness were slowly sinking into her awareness.
The hospital concealed the fact that I was continuously injected
into a state of confusion and stupor with a tranquilizer used for
psychotics who are dicult to control. My relatives were told that I
was on no medication, although from it I suered depression,
anxiety, confusion. My speech was slightly stilted from the head
injury but mainly from drugging. These and my constant demand
for departure were used as evidence by the sta that I needed to
stay a minimum of six months. Such treatment was not for the
concussion for which they had nothing but to make me renounce
and forget my intention to leave. They persuaded my narcissistic
father and his narcissistic family, who held conference in the corner
of my room without any input from me.
I was desperate to leave and becoming sicker by the day. I
constantly demanded, begged, and pleaded with my relatives for
release to my treatment of choice, but no one would listen, which
was a paradigm of the usual situation for the child of narcissistic
parents. Sickened and helpless as I was, it could not have been more
horrible.
My mother would feel terrible and say, “You’ll leave tomorrow.”
But lying was her way and she was too scared to follow through.
That I expected to leave was put on my hospital record as a sign of
my living in delusion.
I became my child self in search of a loving parent. I wanted a
hand to reach for mine with no strings attached. I needed
understanding and support for what I judged important. This a
narcissist cannot give. Denial of my need set my negative introject
in motion.
I was not without ideas of my own, a little unintelligible due to
the drugging, but desperately trying to communicate. I never had
imagined that I, a well-trained clinical psychologist with twenty
years of experience in mental health care, would not be listened to.
It was too frightening to contemplate. On the edge of consciousness,
I toyed with the idea that the hospital was killing me with
nontreatment and drugging. I gave up on receiving help and was
sinking into thoughts of suicide and murder. I fell into the severe
anxiety and hopelessness of a stress disorder that lasted well after I
left the hospital. It had everything to do with the care I received and
little with my response to concussion.
Narcissistic torture feeds the introject. To visitors who would not
heed me, I was an “it.” Not knowing that I was drugged, they
ignored my requests as fantasy. My narcissistic uncle later told me
that I begged him to get me out, up to the point of irtation. It was
horribly sad to hear him speak. My mother untied me each day for
our four hours of visitation but would not let herself believe that I
was tied down all the rest of the time. Everyone avoided awareness
of the painful facts of what I tried to tell them. The doctors knew
best. My mother, less narcissistic than the others, saw that I was not
getting better and heard my mounting anxiety and depression. Each
day she promised to remove me, then fell into fear and paralysis.
On my ninth and nal day in the hospital, she found me wrapped
in restraints from neck to shins and arm to arm. Before this event, I
had managed to untie myself and had gone to the desk to demand
release. They refused and it turned into a ght with eight in sta to
pin me down. My horried mother arrived and asked, “What is this,
an asylum? My daughter is here for concussion.” As always, I
begged to leave.
She saw my fury, hating her for what they did with her
permission. It was too much for her. “She is leaving.” Sta was up
in arms. “She’ll be ruined on the outside, will fall on her head, and
take to bed forever.” I left AMA. (Against Medical Advice), feeling
how few people can understand your needs. Friends had been
instructed by the sta to dismiss my words as babble. They forgot
me as a person because I was trauma-short on vocabulary. Now that
time has gone by and the facts have come out, they are shaken.
This tragedy was in keeping with the predictive voice of my
negative introject—a split skull and a major battle against the forces
of institutionalization before I could get on with healing myself
through natural methods and the writing of this book. My struggle
echoed the introject’s words: “You will be killed for trying.”
I don’t bob as much for my narcissistic parent’s praise. Before,
desire kept me wide-eyed in hope of approval. Now I do not trust
his word and intention. One does not care so much to win the
attering words of people you do not think are on your side. What is
that praise worth and who is the one they are praising? When I am
falsely attered like this, I no longer feel like the original me. I am
looking on.
I had forgotten my passivity as a child of narcissistic parents but
this accident brought it back. My concussion caused dependency
that was used by my narcissistic parent to attack and push me
further down. He considered a “healing” institution when I was
asking for release. The narcissist always knows what is best for you
no matter what you say. Now I look before I react and events are
not coming at me so expectedly. I am better able to judge what is
going on in other people.
I feel the subtle sensation of change. I do not feel and think the
same way. When conducting a therapy session, I have visual
imagery of patients that they later conrm, which shows that I am
picking up even minimal cues. I am more aware of lying, that
people say what they think you want to hear but which they don’t
intend; that some people are reliable and others are not. I am more
sensitive to subtleties. Sometimes I ask myself if I am growing
paranoid, but from the amount of love I feel, I would say that I am
growing up.
Without personal analysis, children of narcissists suer worse
consequences. Using the writing of this book as a metaphor for any
plan you choose, it is a struggle to carry it out. If completed, your
book will not leave the drawer. If a publisher is found, will you
perish in a hospital? It is interesting that the biking accident
happened to me on the day following the sale of my book.
The introject is ruthless. At varying times, you will have to battle
its self-suppressive force. The introject will activate to knock you
back and down. Your assigned position is what the narcissistic
parent wants.
Being in a crisis with greater expectations makes you more
accessible to your negative introject. If you have narcissistic parents,
relatives, and friends, your hopes are often disappointed. You rarely
get what you ask for even on your birthday. What is it like when
your needs are stated and the parents still go their own way? A
parent teaches her child to blame himself for parental shortcomings
and later for all bad events. In a crisis, you will see yourself as at
fault. The negative introject is fed with anti-self material and gives
you messages of self-hatred in return.
Even in an extreme situation, it is wrong to think the narcissist
will be ready to meet your everyday hopes and needs, much less
extreme ones. Do not attack yourself for wanting this. You are a
pupil of self-punishment. Your introject will turn against you when
there is insucient consideration and love. Needing nurturance
from those who lack it to give is no cause to attack yourself.
Your introject babbles about your lovelessness in explanation.
This learned distortion can be undercut by relating to a person or
creature by whom you feel loved. On my post-accident “vacation,” I
was in love with a Vermont puppy, a huge black Labrador that
followed me around, even onto my couch, where it deposited its
tiny 100 pounds on my chest, nibbling wildly at my ngers and
face. It was so full of outrageous life that it made me laugh and got
me going. It was so friendly and assertive that I could not remain in
a bleak mood.
Find people who can love you and vice versa. Bring them into
your life. Are you axed to narcissists? Do you need to learn to
recognize a dierent type of person who will support you in happy
times and emergency? If nurturance is available, the ngers of your
negative introject will not clutch at your throat.
Although we may not be aware of it, we spend our lives
separating from our parents. When we are in emotional need, our
need for parent love becomes strong again. We think the appearance
of this need should make us unhappy since our narcissistic mind is
vain. It says that childish needs are eternally childish. But people are
eternally childish and eternally growing. It is resistance to the
process that makes for problems. Maturing never ends. It is
immaturity that declares us nished. The narcissist arrests his
pattern of growth with a stance of perfection and does not mature.
Denying parts of self that need work means hiding in a limited state.
Children of narcissists must ght for independence from the
narcissistic parents who would live through them. Such parents treat
their children as imperfect and rejected or perfect and connected to
the parent. Such a concatenation of self and value is not the road to
development. Narcissistic parents do not grant adulthood to their
ospring as people on their own. The parent cannot conceive of
such a relationship.
We are always becoming autonomous and separating from our
negative introject. It ghts to hold on and we struggle to let it go. It
is self versus introject and each thought system claims to be the real
you. There is a guilty conict between love of self and love of
parent. Can we live untrammeled by our parents’ word as expressed
through the introject? We would not have introjects like these if our
parents hadn’t rejected our basic human parts out of their own
irrational pressures. Holding on to a negative view of self keeps the
introject alive. We need to believe in our intrinsic value and right to
err if we want to be introject-free.
Our narcissistic parents see us as a rehabilitation project. We
express negative introjects inherited from their own rejecting
parents. Such introjects kept them from humane responsiveness to
us, a nightmare passed from generation to generation. With
knowledge, we will try to stop the transfer. We will not carry on its
decisions even toward ourselves. It is a battle. For life.
If you want to change your thinking to feel less pain but run from
the pain introduced by the negative introject, your pain will
increase. It is like a helpless child’s response to an attacking parent.
“I must get away from this. It is too horrible to bear.” Pain grows in
proportion to the magnitude of your fear.
Instead note, “I am giving myself hurtful messages but I know my
tendency to think the worst and shall rst assess the diculty.”
Objectivity reduces your introject’s power. If you nd a problem in
your behavior, it is not equivalent to the worth of your self. A
narcissist confuses his behavior and self, which renders him
defensively incapable of seeing his diculties.
Your negative introject can haunt you with tragic fantasies about
yourself. To heal, say, “Tell me all and let me see it in a clear light.”
Fears grow in the shadows. Phobic people are haunted by fear. The
more they avoid what they fear, the worse the phobia. Phobia
spreads to new objects that are connected with the old.
Contamination spreads through ight. Avoidance is a poor response.
Approach the thing you fear and do it till your fear runs out. If
what you fear is the punitive voice of your negative introject, do not
run away, argue, or cry over its attack. Fearful adulation gives it
power. You wept to arouse your parents’ pity. It is the awe of
insecurity that attested to their greatness. They were attered by
their power over you.
In our culture, women often cry instead of showing anger. Tears
announce their inferior position. The child of a narcissist is in a
similar position. He cannot be openly angry with his parents and
later defers to their representative in the negative introject. He
needs to stop groveling beneath his introject’s heel and sniveling at
its words. He needs to remove the negative introject from its
pedestal.
If instead you support the introject by letting its pejorative
comments hit home, you are trading punishment for the hope of
love. If you put o the quest for freedom, you always will lack love.
Back and forth you go but once you surrender your quest for love
from a narcissist, you will feel emptiness, which hurts and makes
you wonder why you live. This is a time to mourn for what you will
never have. In mourning you accept that the narcissistic parent will
never give as much love as you need. No more chance to win the
love that was absent. After suering this loss, you will move on. A
loss that is known eventually can be healed.
Coming from a childhood of frequent pain, minimal touching, and
little understanding, you can barely tolerate your feelings. You falter
at the crossroads and return to the destructive mouthings of your
introject or choose a narcissistic partner. Finally you prepare
yourself for the pain of knowing what you lack. This is like an
empty dock at which you can tie a dierent boat. The boat of a
person who loves you.
Children of narcissists are raised with the belief that they have
traits that make them special and unlovable. The narcissist focuses
on his child’s aws as reason for his own incapacity to give. The
child later is hurt by her introject’s criticism because she believes
her parent’s words. Exaggerating her own aws keeps her in
character.
Nonnarcissistic people see a dierent image. They love one
another with aws perceived like smoke rising from a re. The re
is what counts. A narcissist projects his unacceptable and secret
aws into his child and feels a lack of love for one so ruined. His
child feels alarm and depression when things go wrong. Her aws
justify a troubled life. She doesn’t know that she lives an image
handed down.
You need to develop a neutral and inquisitive attitude. How can
you be friendly with the negative introject that attacks you? A bully
is strengthened by his victim’s fear but is thrown by neutrality. If
you are attentive to your introject without undue anxiety, you will
achieve a degree of separation.
Listen to negative thoughts without automatically accepting them
as true. A nondefensive approach is good with the critical parent as
well. Objectivity achieves more than ghting. If you ght, you are
dismissed as infantile. When your conduct is neutral, your views are
more likely to be reckoned with. Listen and decide what is true and
to what degree. You may need consultation. If you are new to self-
evaluation and readily demolished, bring the comment to another
person or group whose opinion you trust.
Creativity can help you heal. When I had the notion of examining
my introject, I was feeling weak and fearful of the undertaking. I
was in a macrobiotic center in California for my summer vacation.
This was a Japanese-style dwelling surrounded by mountains. It was
built in a hot valley where every possible fruit and vegetable was
raised. It gave cooking classes and helped us analyze our physical
weaknesses. We learned how to change our way of living in order to
feel better and walked on the damp grass of early morning to get
our energy moving. It had many minor healing workshops,
including yoga and meditation.
At that time, I felt that I didn’t need more negative thoughts than
I already had. I was in a personally discouraged mood when I went
to a workshop on healing imagery. After the guidance of a slow
entry into inner calm, one envisioned living in a favorite spot. For
me, it was the wilderness.
I hoped to nd some strength and was skeptical, while wondering
in what form it would come. Into my mind came a moose, a
beautiful, large, and quiet creature, sticking its antlered head into
my primitive, next-to-nature abode. My place was blessed. The
moose stayed a while, just was there and then left. I felt inspired by
its presence and sought its meaning in words but none would come.
It simply was, like the self, the song of connection with the earth, a
spirit without words. It was love of, to, and by the self.
What does this meditative vision and practice mean? Children of
narcissists distrust and devalue their inner selves as if nothing of
value could come from inside. This is wrong. Listen to your intuitive
part and look with awe at what it produces. Outpourings can take
any form or meaning. It is your own symbolism. Creativity does not
come out of a can or TV. Children are creative but grow up to be
average adults who are pulled away from creativity. They think
themselves without creativity but have learned their
impoverishment. Narcissistic parents undermine your creativity
with, “Is it good enough?” Good enough for what? People talk about
my writing and painting. “But you’re creative.” We are all creative
in our way. Talent, imagery, strength from the unconscious is
human. Your vision is dierent from mine but it is there.
By creativity I mean allowing your wishes and visions to inspire
you. If you are moved by what comes to your mind, something will
emerge to express your inner state. You may nd the solution to a
problem, write a song or story, a poem that captures deep meaning.
You impulsively take a walk in the woods and feel its life around
you. Suddenly a recipe comes to your mind for the curious remains
in the icebox. You remember the pleasure of an ancient friendship,
and so on.
Some therapists have said that creative people avoid knowing
their neuroses by turning their problems into art. But this can be
quite untrue. A creative person hears his crying self and can’t avoid
what he thinks and feels. He may use creative powers for healing
and seek imaginary or real solutions. The narcissistic parent often
teaches her child that there is only perfection or failure. If you open
yourself to creativity, there is an innity of visions. Look at your
dreams, the tales you love to hear or tell, and things you nd
beautiful. You will see a young self waiting to develop. We are
always young and always old.
Children of narcissists are trained not to trust their unconscious.
Everything they do must meet an external standard. Despite these
blinders, our inner lives wait to nourish us. Creativity comes if we
are open and receptive. There is more to our self than a learned
opinion.
Narcissistic parents taught us to overvalue what we received from
them and to undervalue our self and its byproducts. Good was to be
like them and bad came from following our own ideas. From their
condemnatory reaction, we learned to be afraid of lling our
personal desires. We live in familiar hell and call new behaviors
negative before the results are in.
You need to live according to experience and dier according to
insight as you go. Your values can be your own and not
compulsively tied to external measures, such as those of your
narcissistic parent, which might include money, fame, beauty,
smartness, power. We can stop leading lives to impress the
narcissistic community.
We give ourselves a lower rating than others do. Like all people,
we make mistakes. These do not merit condemnations to wear upon
our breasts but are to learn from. Humor and courage make good
partners. Seeing your diculties and your tendency to exaggerate
blame, humor makes it easier to change.
One time I was meditating in a large group. It was dark and the
woman in front of me was restless, continually moving her body.
Meditators are supposed to sit quietly. In my highmindedness, I
hated her for her noise and spent a lot of my attention calling her
selsh and a thousand other names. It was all hatred and
resentment at her ruining “my” meditation. She was to blame for
my mood until the lights went on and I took a look at my “enemy.”
She was crippled and found it hard to sit.
Children of narcissists are much hurt by narcissistic parents and
become prone to thinking themselves attacked. We believe people
are out to harm us, an error that is hard to eradicate since we are
always adding new examples to our list. Such thinking is eradicated
when we see nonenemies in their stead. It was so hard for her to sit.
I was amazed and sorry about what I felt. I learned about my
tendency to misperceive actions as intended to hurt. I misread facts
based on limited information and my predilection for feeling
mistreated. A great teaching. As I try to stop personalizing events,
my life is becoming easier.
How are we to get over this tendency, called personalizing? A
meditation teacher once told a story about this very problem. An
Oriental man was rowing on a foggy lake. Unexpectedly, his boat
was crashed into by another. He cursed that careless rower and was
beside himself with anger at the other’s intolerable nerve. Then the
boat that hit his oated by and he found it empty. Bent on seeing
himself beset, he had created the plot of deliberation that gave him
pain.
If you want to get rid of the personalizing tendency to think that
people are against you, start with your experience of growing up
with narcissistic parents. Your life with them has shaped your
vision. They were destructive in their need to see things their way.
Was their aggressive and invasive ignorance meant to harm you or
merely a mirror view of their own inner world? I think the latter,
since there was nothing and no one outside their selves. There was
no intention to do you harm as they tried to fulll their wishes and
responsibilities. You were felt to be an extension of them, with your
own needs barely heeded. They were drowning people clinging to a
spar of wood. So desperate was their situation that they could not
see your position. If you broke through their protective reverie it
triggered a horrible mood.
Then they would become intent on giving injury or being mean.
Their child was ghting their inuence and trying to stand apart
from or against them. In narcissistic thinking, good is to be
identical. Infallibility is contradicted if their child takes another
path. They would attack you because in their desperate self-
centeredness, they misunderstood your motives.
Emerging from this imbroglio, you perceive an undesired response
from them as deliberate. Your parents were sarcastic and enraged
and much that they did turned into an attack. This is how you saw
them. To expect harm and to see attack gets your running legs
going, which sets you up for less disappointment. You grow and still
react to people as hurtful. Freedom comes from not seeing malicious
intention where none is intended.
Hold back on concluding the presence of malicious intent. Doubt
your supposition and, before you draw a conclusion, nd out the
facts of motivation. Use outside information and underplay your
predilection for injury.
We are afraid of change and repeat behaviors that wreck our
lives. Sameness to sameness. If we try to change, we do so at a
snail’s pace that never arrives or move so hurriedly that little
change occurs. Lightning speed protects us from being snared,
cornered, and hurt. We are afraid to hear the cry of what was left
behind, an expectation from our hypersensitive parents who
overreacted to our changes. We learn from this that all we do is
hurtful, even a new hairdo or a way of speaking. We worry more if
we are changing a known habit. Will we lose our friends? We look
for and nd responses of pain. We hurry past our feelings, so
fraught with anxiety, guilt, and grief.
In change, there is losing and gaining. We need to mourn our
losses and to grow from the rotting wood of renounced ways. The
additional pain we feel is what we inict on ourselves in
anticipation of the critical reactions from our parent stand-in.
A woman wants to change but says she can’t. She claims to like
what she is doing, eating and smoking herself to the grave. She
thinks that her self-destructive behavior started as rebellion against
her narcissistic and controlling mother. She had to do it her own
way. Her mother lectured in scorn to those who could not learn. It
seemed like a giving but was really a taking. Daughter’s self-
destructiveness gives Mother a project to work on. She served her
mother as an untoward kid and does so now in gorging food and
cigarettes. Her belly hurts from overeating and her obesity hangs
down. Does she know when her stomach is full? She never listens to
her feelings.
With controlling parents who need to be right and in charge, we
do not learn what we need. Whether to stay or go, to change or to
stay put. We leave home as frightened fugitives, beset by our
negative introjects. We need to hear from our selves. That is the
moose, the beast that entered my vision and showed me a form of
down-to-earth being. That moose is an image of my inner self. It is
my truth for me.
Do not be surprised if stress activates the voice of your negative
introject. The child of a narcissist falsely attaches her sense of self-
worth to outcome, which creates desperate worry. If your introject
says worry, send it packing with questions like, “What’s the big
deal?” “Are you personalizing the outcome?” “Are you measuring
yourself with dollar bills?” Money does not imply value. Do not
apply external measurement to your self.
Do not leap through externally designated hoops. A scientist had
to make A’s for his punitive and narcissistic mother. Anything less
led to a beating. As an adult, he suers from severe depressions and
cannot work. In his mind his mother is at his buttocks with a whip.
He needs to remind himself that he likes to work and need not seek
outside approval for doing it. Put the introject in mothballs.
We need to know when therapy would be a good approach. Many
people who suer from an overwhelming and intrusive negative
introject are told, “It’s impossible to like yourself better.” They have
to live in misery as if it were the only way. Their introject says
“Follow me” to repetitive misery.
A narcissistic falsehood is to believe that one should appear
perfect and need no help. Narcissistic parents said that you should
be able to master all problems, while nding you incapable of
adaptation. This attitude overlooks the fact that useful eorts are
stymied by aspects of your personality.
You may see only your best and call it perfect, or see only your
worst and feel hopeless. You have been parent-trained to look this
way to please them. You may be unreachable to contradictory
comment. How are you to nd your blind spots and errors if your
introject makes it too miserable to approach your self and your
personality disregards you self’s comments as a problem.
Given such obstacles, reasonable input is called for. Solitude is not
ecient in getting the job accomplished. Some of the most original
people, scientists, artists, etc., have asked for help. They questioned
knowledge and openly showed their confusion and error. They had
little shame about blind spots and shortcomings since they already
respected their selves. By exposing weakness they got more strength.
They learned what they wanted to know. We do not advance by
focusing on our image. We want to change from a self-hater who
refuses help and exposure to a self-lover who accepts errors and
openly works on diculties.
How do you know if you need outside help? Are many people
saying the same thing to you about you? Is their tone exasperated
and do their comments show that they think you are not getting
their message? Do you think that you are treated dierently from
others? Is something wrong with your interactions but you cannot
say what? Outside help is in the ong.
Childhood with narcissistic parents means being overly subjected
to criticism, which sensitized you to your shortcomings. Are your
faults as bad as your parents called them? What should you do with
outside criticism? A nonnarcissistic attitude is appropriate. You can
benet from a group that works together on what is happening and
what is perceived.
We were raised to think that narcissistic people like our parents
were the best people and that nonnarcissists didn’t count for much.
Getting to know nonnarcissists shows that this is wrong. Children of
narcissists can share their stories and speak about their negative
introjects. They share their troubles and move on.
We need to investigate opinions and hunches. Do not accept ideas
at face value. Your narcissistic parents raised you to swallow the
family line. Mom/Dad was “correct” in viewpoint and “perfect” in
parenting. Now you are easily misled by forceful sellers. Focus on
your habit of acceptance. Know that you will bend under pressure.
Inquire about the facts and take the time you need before making a
decision. Do not renounce what you want just to please another. In
searching for friends, give up codependency. Wait for one that you
like and hunt for one that you trust, a person who accepts you as
you are.
EPILOGUE
Because children of narcissists are
raised to follow parental dictates, to believe that what the parent
thinks is right and to defer to authority, it is important for these
individuals to break the habit of allowing other people to set their
path.
For this reason, it is inappropriate for me to recommend a course
of action. This book has presented many kinds of examples and
methods to get you closer to your true identity. There are various
techniques of meditation and a large variety of therapy workshops
or individual therapies in which you can work to change yourself. If
you do not know which one to choose, attend various workshops
and test them out. Read books on the subject. Speak to people and
hear what they think about the method they follow.
As with all of life’s experience, you must be the judge of its worth.
What someone else values and what you hold dear may dier. The
main thing is to accept what you have tested and personally found
true. Membership in a group can be comforting but not as
comforting as learning to stand alone.
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition
from which it was created. To locate a specic passage, please use
the search feature of your e-book reader.
abandonment, 57, 60–61, 73, 75, 76
fear of, 49, 83, 92, 199
feelings of, 46, 101
abuse, 56, 63–64, 104–105, 152, 190
“accidental,” 77
by fathers, 50, 51, 59–60, 73, 74, 77, 112, 115, 185
love equated with, 59–60, 74, 131
by mothers, 50, 87, 134, 136, 258
by narcissistic mates, 74, 75, 77, 83, 84, 87–88, 89
sexual, 112
verbal, 77, 114, 191
acting, 170–172
acting out, sexual, 30
addiction, 74, 78, 88, 106, 183, 209, 236, 244
alcoholism, 62, 87, 106, 199
drug use in, 52, 62, 75, 86, 87, 99, 107, 155, 225, 232
to food, see eating; obesity
overcoming, 155–156, 159
admiration, need for, 12, 20, 32
adult children, 12–15, 25–33, 51, 147–168, 171, 218
anger of, 14, 43, 69, 126, 151, 162, 163, 203, 206, 207, 211,
228–229, 233, 234, 235
anti-self attitudes of, 147–148
belief vs. suspicion in, 167
biological perspective needed by, 233
blind spots of, 33, 122–123, 191, 207, 221, 258
codependency of, 232, 236, 259
common problem of, 28
critical attitude in, 100–101, 108–110, 154, 157, 176, 195, 199,
227–228
criticism believed by, 29, 134, 228, 229, 230, 233–234, 241
dead family member replaced by, 123
dichotomous thinking of, 165–167, 195
discouraged by real-life diculties, 46
emotional numbness in, 51, 94–95, 115, 117, 143–145, 183
functional constriction in, 111–117, 185, 203, 204–208, 243
gullibility of, 30–31, 259
harm feared by, 136, 154–155, 255–257
hypersensitivity of, 30, 32, 121, 128, 151–152, 153–154, 157,
162, 171, 172, 224, 229
insensitivity to others in, 123–124, 154, 157
intrusiveness in, 116–117
learned errors of, 148
maladaptive behavior of, 29–30, 31, 53
mourning for childhood needed by, 128, 252, 257
narcissistic character traits in, 32, 116
narcissistic habits acquired by, 116–117, 143, 157–158, 227–228,
245
negative expectations of, 153–155, 227
open play dicult for, 182
as overachievers, 156
paranoid tendencies of, 30, 102, 255–256
parental perfection accepted by, 228
performance problems of, 29–30, 46, 48, 67, 107–108, 153, 156–
157
procrastination by, 113, 156
projections of, 151
psychological helping professions entered by, 107–108, 203, 207
roles played by, 12, 14, 33, 61, 81, 94, 116, 203
self-presentation of, 223–229
separation feared by, 81–83
sexual inhibition of, 99, 176
shared repetitive patterns of, 121
social isolation of, 59, 66, 94, 174, 181, 184, 194, 198, 210–211,
214–215, 216, 219, 226; see also friendships
solitude feared by, 82–83
spouses of, 48–49, 53, 56–57, 75–76, 136–137, 142, 143–144,
151, 214
strength linked to weakness in, 162–164, 204, 215, 216, 234
submissive conformity of, 13, 30, 35–44, 83, 89, 92, 101, 115–
116, 120, 135–136, 151, 201, 202, 203, 216, 228, 236, 237
talent for suering in, 123–124
transference by, 31
unknown feared by, 153, 176
unrecognized abilities of, 156–157
see also children; healing
aging, 53–54, 137–138, 225, 226
agreement, demands for, 35–44, 119–120, 125–126, 158, 229, 236–
237
Alan (intellectual superiority), 119–129, 132
alcoholism, 62, 87, 106, 199
Alice (social isolation), 198, 210–211
Alpert, Richard (Ram Das), 173–174
anger, 14, 43, 69, 126, 162, 163, 203, 206, 207, 211, 228–229, 233,
234, 235
acknowledging, 151
crying vs., 252
see also rage
animals, 184, 193–194, 211, 213, 246, 250
Anne (negative introject), 45–54, 97
anti-Semitism, 183–184
anxiety, 20, 46, 49, 73, 82, 93, 162, 248, 253
separation, 81–82
signal, 98
approval, parental, 19–20, 79, 80, 81, 103, 115, 122, 127, 142, 149,
152, 162, 180, 233–234, 235, 237, 249
artists, 92, 123, 150
assertiveness, 83, 128, 141, 201, 202, 203, 218
asthma, 195, 242
autonomy, 20, 28, 33, 36, 51, 92, 117, 124, 171, 182, 228, 237, 251
development of, 81–82
see also self
beauty, personal, 19, 192, 202, 227, 245
mothers and, 29, 73, 79, 101–107, 135, 199, 200
bed-wetting, 109, 195
Be Here Now (Alpert), 173
belief vs. suspicion, 167
biological perspective, 233
blind spots, 33, 122–123, 191, 207, 221, 258
body, 158–162
criticism of, 79, 134, 169, 170, 180, 192, 224, 227, 229
of daughter, mother’s mistreatment of, 103–107
feeling torn apart in, 161–162
improper care of, 99, 160–161
negative sensations in, 162
nudity of, 169–170
objectionable failings of, 194–196
pain in, 159
see also obesity
body image, 102
breast reduction, 107
Buddha, 174
camp, 150–151
car sickness, 195
character, 19
character traits, narcissistic, 11, 18, 23, 32, 116
charm, 21, 89
public vs. private, 60, 80
children, 12–15, 21–22, 23, 116, 125, 132, 178, 201, 235–236, 244
of adult children, 47, 52, 67, 76, 78, 82, 121, 122–123, 141–145,
164, 165, 190, 203, 214
dependency of, denied by parent, 141–145
as extension of parent, 12, 51, 52, 82, 165, 184, 251, 256
grandiosity in, 20, 21
healthy exhibitionism in, 22, 172
idealized, 12
identication with parents and, 15, 73, 109, 117, 157, 158, 218
negative parental assessments believed
by, 30, 61, 67, 91–95, 102, 149–151, 156, 228–229, 235, 253
other people’s, preference for, 61, 65
parental approval sought by, 19–20, 79, 80, 81, 103, 115, 122,
127, 142, 149, 152, 162, 180, 233–234, 235, 237, 249
parental identication with, 20, 224
parental “improvement” of, 27, 29, 58, 102, 103, 105, 157, 182
parental problems transplanted to, 29, 91–95, 102
parents’ personal ambitions fullled by, 58, 141–145, 162
projections of, 14
projections onto, 12–13, 27, 103, 107, 145, 193, 253
rage of, 14, 126
roles assigned to, 12–14
separation anxiety in, 81–82
see also adult children
cleanliness, compulsive, 114
codependency, 209, 232, 236, 259
competition, 160, 238
compromise, 236–237
conformity, submissive, 13, 30, 35–44, 83, 89, 92, 101, 115–116,
120, 135–136, 151, 201, 202, 203, 216, 228, 236, 237
conscience, 98, 244
constriction, functional, 111–117, 185, 203, 204–208, 243
control, need to, 38, 50, 51, 98, 100, 116, 133, 134, 137, 142, 143,
202, 204, 207, 208, 225, 227–228, 257
creativity, 23, 187–188, 253–255
artistic, 92, 123, 150
criticism, 12, 13, 18, 22, 32, 53, 92, 97, 114, 150–152, 172, 180–
182, 184, 185, 210, 229–235, 236
by adult children, 100–101, 108–110, 154, 157, 176, 195, 199,
227–228
appropriate reactions to, 229–232, 234–235, 259
believed by adult children, 29, 134, 228, 229, 230, 233–234, 241
of body, 79, 134, 169, 170, 180, 192, 224, 227, 229
humor vs., 230–232, 238
hypersensitivity caused by, 151–152, 171, 224
ignored, 230
love equated with, 31, 192
by negative introject, 242, 253, 257
noncombative rmness toward, 229–230
public, 230–232
crying, 252
cults, 31, 165
cynicism, 74
Darjeeling, India, 174–176, 217
David Neel, Alexandra, 174
defensive mechanisms, 183
Delores (narcissistic mates), 57, 64, 71–90, 163–164, 190, 191
dependency, 52, 79, 92, 127, 198–201, 209, 249
of children, parental denial of, 141–145
of narcissistic mates, 75–76, 78, 83, 84–89, 199, 208, 210
depression, 23, 43, 46, 54, 79, 87, 98, 104, 117, 122, 138, 178, 206,
225, 242, 248, 258
see also suicide
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition)
(DSM 3), 18
dieting, 132
diet pills, 53, 99, 106, 107
Doryan (self-suciency), 198, 211–215
doubt, 12, 52–53, 72, 108, 121, 142, 182, 189
dreams, 73, 85, 112, 124, 126, 155, 200, 244
dress, style of, 105–106, 132, 134, 217–218
dukkha, 163
drug use, 52, 62, 75, 86, 87, 99, 107, 155, 225, 232
in hospitalization, 247–248
Eastern religions, 75–76, 158, 173–174
Zen Buddhism, 57, 67–68, 163, 164, 167
see also meditation
eating, 99, 121, 132, 137, 162, 202–203, 257
compulsive, 102–103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 225, 227
controlled by mothers, 136, 202
double messages about, 103, 105
love equated with, 103
procrastinated, 156
as regression, 160
see also obesity
emotional numbness, 51, 94–95, 115, 117, 143–145, 183
empathy, 18
emptiness, inner, 21, 23, 94, 201, 236, 252
entitlement, sense of, 18, 21, 51
exercise, 53, 99, 132, 161, 207, 224, 225–226
exhibitionism, 18, 22, 172
fairness, judgment of, 232–233
family, 57–58, 63, 64, 93–94
abandoned by father, 60–61, 73, 75, 76, 199
dead member of, replaced by adult child, 123
narcissism in all members of, 37, 152–154, 195, 229, 237, 247–
248
of narcissists, 12, 20–22
fantasies, 30, 65, 73, 164, 178, 205, 221, 238, 248
grandiose, 18, 20, 21, 29, 144
in healing, 148–149, 254, 257
father(s), 13, 20, 50–52, 75, 80–81, 123–125, 127, 148, 161, 187,
200, 204, 210, 230–232
abuse by, 50, 51, 59–60, 73, 74, 77, 112, 115, 185
of author, 36–44, 72, 91–92, 93–95, 120, 122, 126, 128, 149,
151–152, 169, 170, 171, 172, 176, 180–182, 183–184, 216,
218, 221, 223–229, 233–234, 249
distant, 58–65, 73–74, 75, 83, 84, 89, 164
dreams of, 112
family abandoned by, 60–61, 73, 75, 76, 199
incestuous feelings in, 50, 192
Jewish, anti-Semitism of, 183–184
in negative introject, 55–69, 111–117
nonnarcissistic, 101–102, 103, 133, 141–142
other people’s children favored by, 65
premarital vs. postmarital behavior of, 80
puritanical, 133, 135, 137, 138
rigidly structured routines of, 38–39
fear, 252
of abandonment, 49, 83, 92, 199
of harm, 136, 154–155, 255–257
of loss, 134, 193–194, 246
of separation, 81–83
of solitude, 82–83
of unknown, 153, 176
rmness, noncombative, 229–230
French Revolution, 17
friendships, 31, 66, 113, 117, 150, 154, 172, 174, 205–206, 209,
217, 232, 245, 249
codependency vs., 259
narcissistic, 22, 25–26, 68, 115
see also social isolation
fudge factor, 30
functional constriction, 111–117, 185, 203, 204–208, 243
gaiety, surface, 49–50, 63, 82
geishas, 227
Giancarlo (traveling companion), 176–177, 178
gifts, 21, 47
other than requested, 26, 36, 87, 235, 249, 250
God Speaks (Maya Baba), 174
Golomb, Elan (author), 91–95, 198, 215–218, 263
father of, 36–44, 72, 91–92, 93–95, 120, 122, 126, 128, 149,
151–152, 169, 170, 171, 172, 176, 180–182, 183–184, 216,
218, 221, 223–229, 233–234, 249
mother of, 38, 91–93, 94, 171–172, 180–182, 216, 226, 248–249
Sara, aunt of, 37–44
grandiose self, 12, 21
grandiosity, 12, 13, 22, 23, 27, 73, 92, 127, 153, 180
in children, 20, 21
in fantasies, 18, 20, 21, 29, 144
of mothers, 20–21, 101
grandparents, 28, 32, 52, 58, 62, 80, 92, 102, 185, 198–199, 237,
251
nonnarcissistic, 25, 93–94, 133–134, 135, 136, 137, 172, 225
group membership, 164–167, 244, 262
group therapy, 51, 220, 245, 259
guilt, 98, 124, 126, 127, 223, 232
gullibility, 30–31, 259
hair, 103–105, 202
hallucinations, 103
handedness, shifting of, 58
harm, fear of, 136, 154–155, 255–257
hatred, 37, 55, 91–92, 93, 100–101, 108–110, 179, 205, 226, 255
see also self-hatred
healing, 54, 66, 68–69, 89–90, 109–110, 112, 117, 147–188, 203–
204, 209–210, 218, 219–220, 261–262
acknowledging anger in, 151
creativity in, 187–188, 253–255
defensive mechanisms vs., 183
fantasy images in, 148–149, 254, 257
group membership and, 164–167, 244, 262
love of nature in, 92, 172–173, 174, 179, 180–183, 184, 212,
213–214
meditation in, see meditation
mistreatment and, 152–155
natural, 247
overcoming addiction in, 155–156, 159
redening love in, 90, 177–179, 236
through sensitive people, 25, 183–186, 187, 219
travel in, 173–177, 178, 217
see also psychotherapy
health, 19, 48, 50, 243
of exhibitionism, 22, 172
of narcissism, 11–12
helpfulness, seless, 198, 201–204, 207–210
Himalayas, 174–176, 178
hospitalization, 66, 246–249, 250
humiliation, 51, 61, 77, 114–115, 136, 185, 230, 243
humor, 245, 246, 255
criticism vs., 230–232, 238
hypersensitivity, 22, 44, 124, 127, 128, 170, 257
of adult children, 30, 32, 121, 128, 151–152, 153–154, 157, 162,
171, 172, 224, 229
criticism as cause of, 151–152, 171, 224
idealization, 12, 18, 68–69
identication, 50, 98–99
with aggressor, 111, 186
with child by parent, 20, 224
with parents, 15, 73, 109, 117, 157, 158, 218
self-love learned through, 20
identity, 121, 160, 201, 216, 221, 236, 261
sexual, 13, 80, 102
inarticulateness, 29–30
incestuous feelings, 50, 192
India, 173–177, 178, 217
infallibility, 32, 44, 107, 115–116, 128, 135, 228, 229, 237, 256,
257
inner child, 28, 109, 115
insensitivity to others, 123–124, 154, 157, 232
intellectual superiority, 30, 119–129, 132
grades and, 61–62, 64, 65, 67, 93, 97, 104
parental expectation of, 29, 32, 92, 122, 135–136, 160, 258
interrupting, 31, 124, 237
intimacy, 145, 198, 209, 214–215, 237
introject, 32–33
conscience vs., 98, 244
contents of, 97
development of, 49
external manifestation of, 138
negative, see negative introject
intrusiveness, 20, 116–117, 124–125, 127, 128, 141–142, 171, 212
irresponsibility, 60, 75–77, 84–86
isolation, social, see social isolation
Jewish culture, 125–127, 238
anti-Semitism vs., 183–184
symbiosis in, 125, 127
Jews for Jesus, 165
John (suicidal urges), 55–69, 73, 97, 98, 162–163, 164
Kali, 100, 108, 109–110
Kanchenjunga, Mount, 175
kundalini energy, 165
labeling, 27, 29, 31, 56, 158, 185
Lagkpa (Sherpa guide), 175, 178
learned errors, 148
lesbianism, 99, 102, 108, 231–232
Lorrie (seless helpfulness), 198, 201–204, 207
loss, fear of, 134, 193–194, 246
Louis XIV, king of France, 17–18
love, 22, 29, 91–95, 98, 189–196, 206, 210, 235–236, 238–239
abuse equated with, 59–60, 74, 131
for animals, 184, 193–194, 211, 213, 246, 250
conditional, 14–15, 32, 79
criticism equated with, 31, 192
eating equated with, 103
fear of loss vs., 134, 193–194, 246
hated equated with, 55
manufactured from nothing, 192–193
of nature, 92, 172–173, 174, 179, 180–183, 184, 212, 213–214
negative introject vs., 250, 252–253
objectionable physical failings vs., 194–196
parental, futile expectation of, 20, 45, 49, 52, 71–72, 83, 93–94,
110, 115–116, 117, 125, 132, 136, 145, 177–179, 191, 199,
221, 227, 233, 236, 244, 252, 253
redenition of, 90, 177–179, 236
sadomasochistic, 191–192
self-, 19, 20, 160
see also mates, narcissistic; romantic relationships
lying, 249
parental, 157–158, 248
McLuhan, Marshall, 129
manipulation, 20, 23, 30–31, 84, 97, 127, 228, 229
Marie (obesity), 131–139
Marie Antoinette, queen of France, 17–18
Mark (heroic child), 141–145
Mary (dependency), 198–201
Marx, Groucho, 20
mask, social (persona), 12, 64, 66, 106, 109, 151, 160, 170
mates, narcissistic, 53, 60, 71–90, 136–137, 178, 203, 253
abuse by, 74, 75, 77, 83, 84, 87–88, 89
dependency of, 75–76, 78, 83, 84–89, 199, 208, 210
irresponsibility of, 75–77, 84–86
sexual behavior of, 38, 84, 87, 177, 191, 192, 208, 226–227
see also spouses
Maya Baba, 174
meditation, 57, 68, 138, 163, 179, 217, 253, 254, 255, 261
teachers of, 165–167, 173–174, 256
“Me generation,” 18
military school, 63–64
“mind fucking,” 28
Möbius strip, 214
mockery, 32, 114, 148, 171, 185, 186
moral correctness, 124, 157
mother(s), 26–27, 32, 49–50, 78, 79–82, 143, 151, 165, 214, 257
abuse by, 50, 87, 134, 136, 258
of author, 38, 91–93, 94, 171–172, 180–182, 216, 226, 248–249
beauty and, 29, 73, 79, 101–107, 135, 199, 200
daughter’s body mistreated by, 103–107
dependency abetted by, 52, 198–201
eating controlled by, 136, 202
grandiosity of, 20–21, 101
handedness shifted by, 58
helpfulness demanded by, 201–204
intrusive, 124–125, 127, 128, 141–142
in negative introject, 97–110
nonnarcissistic, 60, 62–63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 76, 91–92, 116, 187,
198–199, 210, 232
obesity and, 133–136, 137–138, 139
paranoid, 207–209, 235
narcissism, 11–15, 17–23, 48, 52–53, 106, 174, 200, 233
alleged shtetl origin of, 125–127
in all family members, 37, 152–154, 195, 229, 237, 247–248
character traits of, 11, 18, 23, 32, 116
external vs. internal, 157
healthy, 11–12
medical model of, 18, 22–23
parasitic nature of, 125
of society, 18–19
narcissistic character disorder, 18
narcissistic habits, acquired, 116–117, 143, 157–158, 227–228, 245
narcissists, 11–15, 17–23, 31, 68, 114, 127, 150–151, 152–153, 188,
192, 215, 224–225, 235, 259
admiration needed by, 12, 20, 32
aging and, 53–54, 137–138, 225, 226
agreement demanded by, 13, 35–44, 119–120, 125–126, 158,
229, 236–237
charm of, 21, 60, 80, 89
cool indierence of, 18
distorted reality perceptions of, 28, 36–37, 53
family of, 12, 20–22
friendships of, 22, 25–26, 68, 115
happy occasions ruined by, 152–153
hypersensitivity of, 22, 44, 124, 127, 128, 170, 257
infallibility of, 32, 44, 107, 115–116, 128, 135, 228, 229, 237,
256, 257
injured self-esteem of, 18, 20, 27, 226, 235
insensitivity of, 123–124, 154, 157, 232
interrupting by, 31, 124, 237
manipulativeness of, 20, 23, 30–31, 84, 97, 127, 228, 229
mates chosen by, 22
neediness of, 21, 232
perfectionism of, 53–54, 114, 152, 171, 254
personal perfection of, 23, 32, 123, 125, 165, 170, 219, 220, 228,
251, 258, 259
psychotherapy of, 23, 127, 205
rage of, 19, 21, 22, 28, 50, 51–52, 87, 92, 97, 125–126, 136, 157
self-centeredness of, 17, 21, 32, 39, 53, 60, 73, 83, 123, 192, 194,
200, 201, 204, 235, 256
sense of entitlement in, 18, 21, 51
sense of specialness in, 11, 21, 22, 123
sense of superiority in, 12, 122, 192, 210, 234, 235
separateness intolerable to, 51–52
sexual behavior of, 38, 84, 87, 177, 191, 192, 208, 226–227
social isolation of, 25, 60, 81, 127, 232, 237
social status desired by, 68, 79, 231, 255
see also mates, narcissistic
Narcissus, myth of, 18
nature, love of, 92, 172–173, 174, 179, 180–183, 184, 212, 213–
214
Nazism, 185–186, 246
negative introject, 33, 45–54, 160, 161–162, 194, 241–259
criticism by, 242, 253, 257
development of, 244
eradication of, 139, 243–244, 249–259
love vs., 250, 252–253
maternal, 97–110
mobilized by events, 246–249, 250
in obesity, 138–139
outside information vs., 245–246, 253, 257
paternal, 55–69, 111–117
psychotherapy for, 244, 245, 258–259
negative reaction, 205
nervous breakdowns, 127, 160
Nick (self-denying negativism), 111–117, 132, 155, 198, 203, 204–
208, 235
Nimcaroli Baba, 173–174
nonauthenticity, feelings of, 14
nosebleeds, 195
nudity, 169–170, 175
numbness, emotional, 51, 94–95, 115, 117, 143–145, 183
obesity, 53–54, 57, 102, 104, 105, 113, 131–139, 225, 227, 237
denition of, 132
dieting vs., 132
diet pills for, 53, 99, 106, 107
negative introject in, 138–139
sexuality vs., 53, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138
see also eating
open play, 182
orgasms, 38, 99, 108–109, 177
overachievers, 156
pacication, 236
paranoid tendencies, 30, 102, 207–209, 235
personalization in, 194, 255–256
parent(s), 11–15, 20, 50, 88, 98, 125, 147, 158, 164, 166, 170, 188,
197, 204–205, 213, 220, 221, 255, 256
addiction in, 155
ambitions of, fullled by children, 58, 141–145, 162
appropriate reactions to, 228, 229–232
children as extension of, 12, 51, 52, 82, 165, 184, 251, 256
child’s love for pets as seen by, 193–194
compromising with, 236–237
consistent disapproval by, 49
controlling attitude of, 38, 50, 51, 98, 100, 116, 133, 134, 137,
142, 143, 202, 204, 207, 208, 225, 227–228, 257
creativity undermined by, 254
establishing new relationship with, 223–239
European, 133, 212
humiliation by, 51, 77, 114–115, 136, 185, 230
idealized, 68–69
identication with, 15, 73, 109, 117, 157, 158, 218
identication with children by, 20, 224
incomprehensibility of, 52–53, 105
intellectual superiority expected by, 29, 32, 92, 122, 135–136,
160, 258
intrusive, 20, 171, 212
judging fairness to, 232–233
love withheld by, 20, 45, 49, 52, 71–72, 83, 93–94, 110, 115–
116, 117, 125, 132, 136, 145, 177–179, 191, 199, 221, 227,
233, 236, 244, 252, 253
lying by, 157–158, 248
“mind fucking” by, 28
mockery by, 32, 114, 148, 171, 185, 186
negative assessment by, 30, 61, 67, 91–95, 102, 149–151, 156,
228–229, 235, 253
negative predictions of, 30, 156
negative scrutiny by, 79, 114, 176, 184, 185, 242, 244
nonnarcissistic, 26
osmotic expectations of, 26–27
pacication of, 236
peculiar world view of, 26
personal problems transplanted by, 29, 91–95, 102
projections of, 12–13, 27, 103, 107, 145, 193, 253
rationalized self-interest of, 28
sadistic, 33, 111–117, 185–186, 204, 231
seeking approval of, 19–20, 79, 80, 81, 103, 115, 122, 127, 142,
149, 152, 162, 180, 233–234, 235, 237, 249
selessness demanded by, 31
sexuality inhibited by, 99, 176
shaming by, 32
sharing activities with, 236–239
see also adult children; father(s); grandparents; mother(s);
narcissists
Parker, Charlie, 224–225
passive-aggressive traits, 31
past-life regression, 149
perfection, personal, 23, 32, 123, 125, 165, 170, 219, 220, 228,
251, 258, 259
perfectionism, 53–54, 114, 152, 171, 254
performance problems, 29–30, 46, 48, 67, 107–108, 153, 156–157
persona (social mask), 12, 64, 66, 106, 109, 151, 160, 170
personalization, 194, 255–257
phobia, 252
play, open, 182
positive reinforcement, 230
pregnancy, 193
procrastination, 113, 156
projections, 14, 151, 153
of adult children, 151
onto children by parents, 12–13, 27, 103, 107, 145, 193, 253
psychosis, 21, 103
psychotherapy, 95, 99, 108, 117, 145, 162, 170, 171, 173, 177, 179,
190, 197, 201, 214–215, 219–221, 231, 232
addicts in, 209
formal, 220–221
group, 51, 220, 245, 259
inadequacy proved by, 150–151
meditation vs., 163
narcissists in, 23, 127, 205
for negative introject, 244, 245, 258–259
negative reaction in, 205
parents threatened by, 14, 221
silence in, 205, 211
singing and, 148
success as motive for, 217
therapist’s character important to, 67, 167, 207, 220
transference in, 205, 220
Rabbit Man, 184, 219
rage, 14, 68, 100, 114, 126
narcissistic, 18, 21, 22, 28, 50, 51–52, 87, 92, 97, 125–126, 136,
157
Ram Das (Richard Alpert), 173–174
reality, perception of, 31–32, 112–113, 233
narcissistic distortion of, 28, 36–37, 53
rebellion, 55–69, 112, 116, 163, 165, 216, 228, 257
regression, 35–44, 160
past-life, 149
role-playing, 12–14, 33, 61, 81, 94, 116, 170, 203
romantic relationships, 50–51, 60, 113, 176–177, 210, 226, 227,
245–246
commitment in, 74, 75, 83, 101
critical attitude in, 100–101, 108–110, 176
identied with self, 98–99
intimacy restricted in, 198, 214–215
see also mates, narcissistic; sexuality
rounded eye, 185
sadism, 33, 111–117, 185–186, 204, 231
sadomasochism, 117, 191–192
Sara, Aunt, 37–44
scrutiny, negative, 79, 176, 184, 242, 244
rounded eye vs., 185
self-consciousness caused by, 114
self, 14, 20, 28, 36, 94–95, 100, 106, 117, 170, 186–188, 216
acceptance of, 29, 186–187
anti-self attitudes vs., 147–148
grandiose, 12, 21
healthy, 19
personality vs., 162, 243
recovery of, 147–168, see also healing
romantic relationships and, 98–99
sabotage of, 48, 108
sadomasochism vs., 117, 191–192
self-censorship, 39
self-centeredness, 17, 21, 32, 39, 53, 60, 73, 83, 123, 192, 194, 200,
201, 204, 235, 256
self-consciousness, 114
self-doubt, 12, 52–53, 72, 108, 121, 142, 182, 189
self-esteem, 13, 28, 92, 142, 156, 228
of narcissists, 18, 20, 27, 226, 235
self-hatred, 80, 99, 102, 107, 132, 162, 190, 194, 219, 225, 250
experiential verication for, 149, 150–151
suicidal urges from, 55–69
self-image, 12, 29, 58, 65, 109, 148, 149, 164, 186, 194, 224, 245
body image in, 102
dual, 136
positive, 133–134, 135, 136, 137
self-importance, sense of, 18
selessness, 31, 51, 83, 244
helpfulness and, 198, 201–204, 207–210, 235
self-love, 19, 20, 160
self-presentation, 223–229
self-suciency, 21, 198, 211–215
self-worth, 19, 20, 29, 93, 98, 153, 154, 155, 185, 198, 223, 257
sensitive people, healing through, 25, 183–186, 187, 219
separation, fear of, 81–83
separation anxiety, 81–82
sexual identity, 13, 80, 102
sexuality, 57, 101, 113, 176–177, 187, 210
acting out in, 30
child abuse in, 112
incestuous, 50, 192
lesbian, 99, 102, 108, 231–232
narcissistic, 38, 84, 87, 177, 191, 192, 208, 226–227
obesity and, 53, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138
orgasms in, 38, 99, 108–109, 177
parental inhibition of, 99, 176
shaming, 32
shtetls, 125–127
siblings, 57, 59, 61–62, 64, 73, 76, 81, 103, 136, 137–138, 160,
208, 211
signal anxiety, 98
singing, 134, 148, 212
social isolation, 134–135, 144
of adult children, 59, 66, 94, 174, 181, 184, 194, 198, 210–211,
214–215, 216, 219, 226
of narcissists, 25, 60, 81, 127, 232, 237
see also friendships
social status, 68, 79, 231, 255
society, 57, 147
narcissistic, 18–19
solitude, fear of, 82–83
specialness, sense of, 11, 21, 22, 123
spouses, 37–39, 80, 91–92, 141–142, 208, 210, 225, 227–228, 231
of adult children, 48–49, 53, 56–57, 75–76, 136–137, 142, 143–
144, 151, 214
behavior required of, 12, 13, 22
as exclusive possession, 101–102
self-censorship of, 39
treatment received by, 38–39, 60, 62, 92, 116
stage fright, 170–172
strangling, 77, 88
strength linked to weakness, 162–164, 204, 215, 216, 234
submissive conformity, 13, 30, 35–44, 83, 89, 92, 101, 115–116,
120, 135–136, 151, 201, 202, 203, 216, 228, 236, 237
suicide, 55–69, 73, 84, 98, 183, 248
motives for, 56
superiority, sense of, 12, 122, 192, 210, 234, 235
see also intellectual superiority
surprise parties, 60, 153–154
suspicion vs. belief, 167
symbiosis, 28, 125, 127, 161
talkers, compulsive, 119–129, 237, 238
teaching, proper, 27–28
technology, 187
Tibet, 173, 174–176, 217
Tillie (seless helpfulness), 198, 201, 204, 207–210, 235
toilet training, 109, 194–195
transference, 31, 205, 220
travel, 173–177, 178, 217
truth-telling, compulsive, 157–158
unicorn, 89
unknown, fear of, 153, 176
unreliability, 53, 72, 78, 79, 82
values, 98, 148, 195, 235, 245, 255, 262
acquisition of, 13–14
of society, 19
Victoria (negative introject), 97–110, 125, 132, 155, 158, 194–196
winning, 19
women, 74, 78
attitudes toward, 38, 44, 80, 87, 148, 180, 226–227
crying by, 252
sexual identity of, 13, 80, 102
wounding, narcissistic, 19, 20
Zen Buddhism, 57, 67–68, 163, 164, 167
Acknowledgments
Thanks to close friends, especially Lisa, Erwin, and Art, who helped
me surmount my doubts when writing this book. Great appreciation
to Harold Brody, the psychoanalyst who supported my struggle for
self-denition and said in response to my questioning his words,
“Life is too short for lying.” Truthful words stay with you.
I appreciate those who trained me in psychotherapy, especially in
observing the eects of insight. Thanks to Bernard Kalinkowitz,
director of the N.Y.U. program in Clinical Psychology. It was he and
the program that welcomed me to psychology.
Gratitude to all who told their stories. To Regula Noetzli, a
literary agent who put great eort and insight into showing me
what was readable and then into getting it published. Thanks to
Maria Guarnaschelli, senior editor at William Morrow, who
understood the book and wholeheartedly supported it.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELAN GOLOMB earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology and her
Certicate in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy from New York
University. Since 1972 she has been in private practice in New York
City. She lives part of the time in Warwick, New York, where she
writes a weekly column called “The Mind’s Eye” for the Warwick
Advertiser Photo News.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your
favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise
Advance praise for Trapped in the Mirror:
Adult Children of Narcissists in Their Struggle for
Self
Elan Golomb, Ph.D.
“Dr. Golomb’s direct and personal style and clear writing will make
this book a valuable resource for all who have suered the eects of
being raised in predominantly narcissistic families. This book will
also be useful to new therapists and analysts who want clarication
in understanding narcissism.”
–JOANN GERARDI, PH.D.
President, American Institute of Psychoanalysis
“Dr. Golomb presents a unique perspective on the dynamics of
narcissism and writes in a compassionate and sensitive manner that
underscores the pain and turmoil of those aicted, never
trivializing or oversimplifying their problems. Trapped in
r/jeA/fjrrorwillbe of interest both to lay readers and people
suering from narcissistic disorders, and will also oer insights to
all professionals.”
–HERBERT ROBBINS, PH.D.
President, New York Society of Clinical Psychologists
“The works of Kohut, Kernberg, Klein, and Winnicott show their
faces in Dr. Golomb’s understanding of her patients’ dilemmas, and
the reader is the beneciary of her many years of analytic and life
experiences. Trapped in the Mirror will help patients who are ready
to tolerate the feelings of loss and rage that accompany the process
of deidealizing such a parent.”
–DONALD MORGAN, PH.D.
“Dr. Golomb’s book addresses a new and important area – patterns
of narcissistic relationships. By using her own experience as a
bridge, Dr. Golomb presents a clear picture of the damaging family
dynamics we too often see in our work with adolescents and their
parents.”
–MARTIN A. BUCCOLO, PH.D.
Chief, Adolescent Division Four Winds Hospital, Katonah, New York
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by Elan Colomb, Ph.D.
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It is the policy of William Morrow and Company, Inc., and its imprints and aliates,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been ordered.
Golomb, Elan, Ph.D.
TRAPPED IN THE MIRROR.
ISBN 0-688-09471-6 91-7669
FIRST EDITION
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BOOK DESIGN BY RICHARD ORIOLO
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